


in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon

by jeannedarc



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: (but only gentle gun violence no human is hurt by a gun in this fic), (you'll see what i mean), Absent Parents, Dead People, Grief/Mourning, Gun Violence, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Organized Crime, Past Relationship(s), References to Drugs, Underage Drinking, Undercover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2020-12-24 14:24:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 43,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21100934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeannedarc/pseuds/jeannedarc
Summary: After washing up on a riverbank in Georgia, Taeyong gets a lot more than he bargained for, in more ways than one.[#s072]





	in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon

**Author's Note:**

> oh buddy. it's been a long time.
> 
> first of all, i'd like to thank the person who prompted this for me -- it's probably my favourite thing i've ever written, and i'm so blessed to get the opportunity to have worked on something that has touched me so profoundly.
> 
> second of all, i'd like to thank m and e for working so incredibly hard on making this everything it could be -- i might have done the bare bones, but you fixed the details and made it as beautiful as it deserved to be. thanks especially to m for holding my hand and for being excited even though you don't go here and you don't know who in god's name i'm talking about. thanks especially to e for leaving thoughtful comments and letting me know i was on the right track.
> 
> thirdly, the most love to the south, and to e, who always supports me, and to each and every writer who let me gripe and complain about writing this -- i love this fic with my entire heart, but that doesn't account for growing pains. so thank you to everyone on the discord servers, everyone who sat up with me late at night and kissed my forehead when i thought i wasn't doing well, or when i was having anxiety about how this would be well-received.
> 
> some places i might have gotten wrong. some timings might seem a little off. if you're from where i wrote about, i love you and i'm sorry that i didn't do the best at it.
> 
> please enjoy. i know i did. ♥

The first thing Taeyong notices when he comes to is that his tongue is dry, heavy, thick in his mouth, filling up the otherwise empty cavern. He must have fallen asleep -- or, more likely, passed out; the distinction is a knife’s edge, a sliver of starlight in an otherwise empty night -- with a nose full of the dust that lies at the trash-coated bank of the Suwanee River.

The second thing he notes is that his stomach is remarkably empty. He wonders what he’d gotten up to the night before; the aridness of his mouth doesn’t hint at what he’d had for dinner, _if_ he’d had dinner. He can’t remember a whole lot of anything, a blank spot where last night should slot into his memory. 

The third thing is that his pockets, too, are empty. He rolls on the concrete that had cradled him to sleep, covered the silt of the Suwanee, damp and exhausted. At least nothing hurts. At least he’d managed to keep himself that safe. He pats himself down twice, making sure he still has his wallet. At least there’s that -- confirmation that he is who he is in times like these, when he can’t remember, and there are blackout spots in his vision that keep him from thinking of too many things that could hurt him.

He misses his mother. He always misses his mother when things like this happen, misses their threadbare carpet in the apartment with the too-thin walls and the bugs as pets, as friends, as constant companions and reminders. But his mother’s been gone for a little while now, and he’s been on his own. He has ended up in a town at the bank of a river a few too many times for this to freak him out.

Really, though -- he’s hungry and doesn’t know what to do about it. He clutches his stomach for a minute, and goes to check his phone. It’s dead. Even if he had a charger he wouldn’t have anywhere to plug it in, his wallet being thinner than he is; the desperation out here is real, his need to have his phone on and working and in his hands so strong he nearly shakes with it. 

Behind him looms a convenience store, an oasis in a green desert. Even if he doesn’t have any money, Taeyong’s gotten alright at stealing when he needs to. He only hopes he doesn’t need to.

Inside, an overworked air conditioner unit buzzes, churning hard and sitting among so many bugs collected in an open windowsill. Taeyong wouldn’t be surprised to find that this building used to be someone’s house; everything looks wooden and wrought, years of use wearing down even the stock on the shelves, sun-bleached cans of cat food and brand-new 2-liter bottles of Diet Dr. Pepper. The place, right down to the bored teenage cashier popping bubblegum, is as tired as Taeyong feels, though he supposes he wins out, having fallen asleep -- passed out, he corrects himself -- in a parking lot.

He approaches said bored teenage cashier, who has the decency to brush his hair from his eyes, look Taeyong in his own. “What can I do for you?” he asks, his inflection demonstrating an interest his face doesn’t quite show.

“How far from a bus station am I?” he asks, tentative, hands stuffed into the back pockets of his ripped jeans, fingers wrapping around the resewn edge of his faux leather wallet.

The kid laughs, and all the bitterness in his eyes floods Taeyong’s head, slow and syrupy. “It’s a two-hour _drive_.” He says it with all the delicacy of someone who’s used to talking to people he doesn’t deem intelligent, shifting from foot to foot, tugging a dollar-store earbud from his ear. “Are you the hobo who was on the sidewalk this morning?”

“Not a hobo,” Taeyong clarifies, way too polite, smiling serpentine in the hopes sharp teeth would keep him safe, presuming they’d done a decent job thus far. They don’t, usually. “If that’s the case, where’s the nearest watering hole?”

“About a ten minute walk down the road.” The kid points in a random direction, flippant and clearly finished with this conversation, if he wasn’t at the time it started. “You gonna buy somethin’ or not?” And it’s now that Taeyong realises the accent, and that this kid looks like him -- a rare thing, he’s noticed, since leaving Florida, and rarer still the further west he travels.

“What’s your name?” he asks, quiet, shy, not much good at making friends that matter and thereby not much good at introductions.

“Donghyuck.” The kid pops his gum again, deadpan. “You?”

“Taeyong. TY, sometimes.”

“Ha! That’s a good one.” Donghyuck goes back to reading some magazine about cars, his level of interest clearly low, dismissing Taeyong now their interaction is finished like an NPC in a video game. 

He’s not sure if it’s the headache, the sleeplessness, the hunger, but everything in this place is liminal, in the emotional sense of the word.

Taeyong shuffles, dazed, out of the store, as hungry as he had been before, but with a bit more direction. His head lolls back and he stares up at a cloudless sky, the first of its kind he’s seen since he got off the coast and got on his bullshit. At least it's a pretty day, if a hot one, and he doesn't hate the way the sunshine feels cradling his face between its warm fingers.

Out on the sidewalk that'd been his bed Taeyong kicks at an empty half of Jack's, carries it down the road with him as he walks, only half sure he's following the direction in which he'd been pointed. He thinks about the phone, heavy in his pocket, and wonders if maybe he should find himself a pawn shop so that at least he can eat today. Not that he expects there to be much in the way of beg and barter around here. His initial plan is to go hustle some dumb fucking beefsteaks out of their billiards money, because it's all he's good at lately. At least, he thinks, he's got a plan B in the works.

The bar, when Taeyong reaches it, is as broken down as the convenience store had been. It also isn't open judging by the lack of cars in the parking lot. Doesn't help that he'd forgotten to ask Donghyuck what time it was; it's probably 9:30 on a Sunday morning and then his plan's fucked. It occurs he doesn't know what day it is, either, and he goes crimson at the realisation.

Fortunately for him and his best laid plans, there's someone outside the bar, if not inside the already-open door; he's having a cigarette, and staring off into space, a curl of almost-black hair framing his face beautifully. He looks too mature to be smoking, much less running a bar like some extra in a frat party film, not that Taeyong's much a good judge of character when it comes to age, profession, _or_ moral character. Not that it works in his favour when he is. "Hey," he calls out, and it must be the trace of the north still left in his throat, because the presumed barkeep looks up, eyes wide, smoke trailing from his lips. "Do you know what time it is?"

The man smiles in a way that makes Taeyong crave an ice-cold sweet tea, shields his eyes from the sun with his hand cupped to his brow. "It's about noon," he replies, he too noticeably devoid of the southernness that had wrapped itself around Donghyuck's voice, back there at the store. "Why, are you looking to get a drink?"

"Not really, no, just... looking to play a game or two." Taeyong smiles back, but it's less sharp than it had been before, less self-defense and more a welcome invitation into his own orbit, he being all too aware what a rarity that is for him.

"Oh, then you're gonna be really disappointed," says the barkeep, raising his cowboy killer back to his lips. "No one's here but me. Someone's _coming_, but no one's here."

"Yeah? Who's coming?" Almost in mimicry but never in mockery, Taeyong, too, cups his hand over his eyes, catching sight of high but round cheeks, a full mouth, a straight but beautiful brow -- not Taeyong's type, but he'd do in a pinch.

"My mom. She basically lives here. Getting set up for a wedding reception. She's the only one who'll officiate anything this side of the river, since no one else likes to come all the way out here." The man might not be southern, true, but he's surely taken to the tradition of telling a life story to answer a simple question. It amuses Taeyong, though he can't really place why. "No one you'd be interested in, stranger. Would you happen to be the man who fell asleep in front of the general store down the way?"

"That's me. Word sure does get around in the middle of nowhere." Something changes in his face, and he stops coming any closer, the barkeep stubbing out his cigarette beneath a work boot, not quite standard kitchen issue but fitting with the theme of 'things that make no earthly sense to Taeyong' nonetheless. "Who's telling you people, the birds or the bees?"

It earns a belly laugh, at the very least. Taeyong's chest puffs up. He's always prided himself on being able to make people laugh, even when he wasn't sure what, exactly, they were laughing at. "Can I get you a drink? The family of the bride's already bought all my stores for the week, I figure you could use something on their tab, and I'm sure they won't miss it." The man winks, conspiratorial. "The groom's family is dry as a bone, y'know?"

Taeyong follows along as the barkeep trails inside. He learns said barkeep's called John -- "Johnny to my friends," he all but purrs, stepping up to the mirror lining his liquor shelves -- and he knows everyone in town, all 216 of the population.

"You don't seem like you're from here," Taeyong points out, settling into a stool, his legs feeling far too short for the task of holding him in place, especially in worn-down Chuck Taylors the colour of seawater.

"I'm from Chicago," Johnny answers airily, doing some of that show-offy, mid-air bottle spinning Taeyong's come to hate over the years. It looks good on Johnny, though. He probably gets lots of tips, this being the middle of fucking nowhere and people not accustomed to magic. In the end, Taeyong ends up with...well, he takes a sip first before judging it by its looks. Jack, Coke, lime. Simple. Effective. "You looked like a lime guy."

"I'm not usually, but it's fine here," Taeyong says in consolation, spreading his palms against the gloss of the wooden bar. "Chicago's far away."

"So's wherever you're from," Johnny replies with a snort, leaning back against his shelves. It's now that Taeyong notices what he's wearing: tux shirt, suspenders, dress slacks neatly pressed, missing only a jacket and sure to find one between now and the wedding party’s arrival. He feels underdressed for a wedding, but seems he's gonna end up crashing anyway. "I had to get out for awhile." He doesn't say more than that, and Taeyong takes him at his word.

"I'm trying to leave, myself," he prompts, by way of continuing the conversation. "If that's at all possible."

Johnny seems to think about this, scrubbing his hand over the sharp hinge of his jaw. "You came from the general store?" Taeyong nods over the rim of his glass. "Go back there. Hang out a few hours. Or you can stay here and spend some time with me. You know anything about tending bar?"

"I drink a lot," Taeyong answers dryly, as if falling asleep in a parking lot wasn’t enough indication of this.

Johnny laughs again, head thrown back, perfect teeth glinting even in the dim lamplight. "Fair enough. I'll give you a few bucks if you'll help me out here when this wedding party gets here."

Taeyong considers this for a long moment, staring into the contents of his glass, watching as his ice dissolves into nothingness. "You got an iPhone charger?"

"Nope." Johnny pops the 'p' at the end of the word. "But my mom does."

///

True to his word, Taeyong helps out with the bartending, and though this isn't his first time as a barback, it _is_ his first time getting paid this much to be one. He doesn't know what Johnny's mysterious lead on escape is, but he's sweetly tipsy when he makes his way back down the road.

Donghyuck is still behind the counter when Taeyong comes in; a bell jingles overhead, and he tries to remember where in his hangover haze that sound had been during the morning. Taeyong reaches to feel the big wad of cash tucked in his back pocket. He crosses to the coolers, grabs himself two bottles of water, drags them to the register. "And a pack of Camel Turkish Royal," he adds, scoffing when Donghyuck asks for his ID.

The plastic clatters to the counter noisily, announcing Taeyong for a grown man where Donghyuck appears still to be a child. "Fair enough," Donghyuck says, a hint of approval in the raise of his brows, the curl of his mouth around what sounds like it might end up a laugh. He proffers the cigarettes, rings up the water. "You aren't gonna pay with card, right? Our satellite signal's been acting weird all day."

In placation Taeyong offers a bill, waits for change, big toe tapping against the barely-blue linoleum. While he's waiting, the bell over the door jangles, announcing the arrival of another human being. Taeyong doesn't turn, unable to fully fathom the idea of a second soul trapped here in southern limbo.

When he does turn, intent on waiting on whatever it was Johnny meant for him to, Taeyong nearly smacks into the most out-of-place human being he's ever witnessed. It isn't in this man’s countenance, of course; people who are out of place rarely know it about themselves, too busy whistling to the wind to care. He’s a dark-haired goth prince dream, a work tank showing off the shape of his shoulders, the extent of his upper arm strength. He flashes a smile, and Taeyong could swear he's got one of those waking hangovers, he so dazzled by the show of sharp, perfect teeth that his knees threaten to give out beneath him.

He curses under his breath. He isn't this sort of person, made weak by the sight of some beautiful boy the likes of whom he doesn't know. Some people, though, are capable of making others that way. Especially people who don't know how strange they look, standing in a ghastly store in the middle of fucking nowhere, the wind scented with bogwater and probable corpses.

"Hey, you a'right?" asks the stranger, and his accent is so thick Taeyong could slather it on a piece of bread for a sweet treat, and probably would. "Y’look a li'l bit faint, there."

"Fine," states Taeyong, all too aware that his icy tone won't get him anywhere, unable to stop now he’s gotten started.

Donghyuck, from behind the counter, pops his gum so loudly that it breaks the connection between the two of them, however fragile it had been. Taeyong, huffing, stomps out of the store, wishing he'd thought to snatch up one of those bottles Johnny had offered him in recompense for his time and effort. Anything not to feel vulnerability, he supposes, kicking at the concrete.

The parking lot, previously empty besides an outdated Miata which Taeyong had presumed belonged to Donghyuck, now has a second occupant: A bright-red Chevrolet, definitely too old to be good but too new to be vintage, full to the brim in the bed with a fuckton of some fruit. Peaches, Taeyong realises, eyes narrowed as he tries to parse what’s real and what’s heat roiling off pavement.

The guy gets done with whatever he's done with, and lingers a few steps behind, a mirage shimmering in the watery lines of summer heat. "Hey, uh, I heard you had cash."

"Yeah," mutters Taeyong, then turns around to face this stranger, this Adonis locked into the Georgia lowland. "Yeah, I do, why?"

"Well, y'see, I only have this card..." He trails off, looking sheepish, hands tucked in the pockets of his jeans, thumbs hooked in his belt loops.

It's not fair. No one should look this fucking gorgeous, not here, not now. Frazzled, Taeyong drags a hand through the faded red of his disheveled hair. "And let me guess, you want me to pay for your...what are you even getting?"

"Fillin’ up the tank." The man gestures to the lone car in the parking lot, a beat-down red pickup with a half-dozen dents of various size in the front bumper alone. Taeyong shudders to think what other secrets the truck could possibly be hiding: underneath its body, under the hood, under the piles of peaches filling bushels in the truck’s bed. "Hyuckie said you're looking for someone to give you a ride to the bus station."

"Yup. I was gonna call a cab."

"Well, a cab'll run you at _least_ a hundred bucks all the way out here, if you can get one at all," he explains. “Y’won’t make it to the bus station. Like to get killed before anythin’ else.”

Taeyong, indignant at his bluff being called -- Johnny had paid him handsomely, like the prince he was, but Taeyong definitely couldn't afford a cab and a ticket back to Florida, or out to Louisiana, or wherever his heart asked him to go -- huffed, stuffing his hands into his back pockets. "Yeah, alright. And you want me to pay for your gas and you'll take me to the bus station?"

"Nope." The guy grins again, and the shadow of those dimples is enough to get lost in. "But I will take you as far as my delivery, which is closer than the bus station, and you can go from there. Or, you can come with me wherever the next delivery takes me."

It's almost too convenient, and Taeyong would be the first to admit that his hackles raise in suspicion every time that southern honey accent slides up into his eardrums. "Where'll it take you?"

"Dunno. I'm gunna find out." The guy glances around, shuffling closer, back so straight Taeyong can't help but imagine breaking the perfection of his posture, preferably half-naked and fumbling and a little tipsy. "But I won't 'til I get there. And I wouldn't mind someone to share the driving w'me, if y'know how to drive."

Again, Taeyong prickles, nods his assent stonily. "It's not a stick, is it?"

"D'you not know how to drive stick?"

"I do, I just don't like it." He sniffles, all overdramatic indignation. "Fine. I'll pay for your gas. How long until we get there?"

"Oh, Lord," and here he wipes his palms on the ass of his overalls, sniffling, the least attractive he’s been thus far, not that it means much when Taeyong’s heart does that annoying shit it does when he’s had too much to drink, or not enough skin-to-skin with whoever it is he’s flirting with at the bar that night. "Maybe about an hour, and we'll stay there a li'l while, and then we'll make our way on to Alabama, figure. Depends on the delivery."

Taeyong sputters. Alabama. He doesn't like the south -- save Florida, of course; Florida’s his favourite place in the States so far -- and he can't imagine himself anything but dead in a nothing state that deep in the Deep. But hell, it isn't like he's got much of a choice. He's hitched himself into this mess, kept his thumb for it; he knows how lucky he is that some dude with an angel face is offering to get him out.

"Alright," Taeyong consents at last, dragging ass back into the store, hand fitted around the bills in his pocket. This much money won't get them that far, but it's better than nothing, isn't it?

He buys snacks that look like they were made an entire generation ago, and extra bottles of water, and asks loudly over the tops of the shelves if there's anything coconut to drink in here. Donghyuck snorts, not even bothering to look up from his phone. "You really think you're gonna get hipster-ass coconut water all the way out here? Go drink from the fuckin' river."

Taeyong shrinks a little, but figures it's fair. Three bags of guacamole Takis, a couple bags of pork rinds, and more than his fair share of different cookies later, Taeyong's stocked and ready to go.

The stranger meanders in. "It's only about fifty bucks in gas," he states plainly as Taeyong's being checked out by a horribly impatient Donghyuck, whose gum snaps are coming quicker and louder now. "Do you plan on sharing the snacks?"

"No." Taeyong tips his chin up, head back, staring at the vaguely flickering lights in the store ceiling. "Maybe ask me again later. All I've had today is berries soaked in champagne and a bunch of Jack Daniel's."

Actually, thinking of that, Taeyong doesn't have a good reason why he's standing up straight right about now. That's probably a question he'll have to answer later. He wants to avoid that altogether, and does so by popping open some Golden Oreos and munching down half the sleeve in the time it takes the stranger to pump the gas.

"What's your name?" he finally remembers to ask, as if it matters, as they're pulling away in a huff of exhaust.

"Jaehyun," he answers, simple and to the point. "You?"

"Taeyong."

No last names. No intimacy. At least, thinks Taeyong, Jaehyun's gotten the message. This won't be a fun trip where they make best friends. But at least it'll be a trip someplace else.

///

Taeyong’s phone goes dead about the time they stop driving.

He wonders for a flash whether or not Jaehyun has one of those old-school cigarette lighters, and whether or not someone can buy a charger all the way out here, where the only sounds that interrupt his thoughts are the rumble of the engine, the sound of Jaehyun humming under his breath, the occasional passing chirp of birds as they drive on by.

Cursing his former self for murdering a perfectly good phone battery, Taeyong focuses his attention on Jaehyun as he slides from the driver's seat, slipping down the truck bed. Taeyong's long since noticed the outrageous number of peaches that rattle around back there, but hasn't said anything about it, except once, when a bushel almost tumbled over the side under its own weight. They'd stopped and fixed it in silence.

"Do you need help moving those?" asks Taeyong, sticking his head out the open window, their only relief to the heat that's settled over the riverland in this, the early evening. The sunset kisses Jaehyun's cheeks prettily. Taeyong's pretended all this time not to notice.

"It'd be nice, yeah," Jaehyun intones, and his voice is so low that Taeyong feels it in the pit of his stomach rather than hearing it, "but f'you don't think you can, m'sure the hand can help me instead."

The stubborn set of Taeyong's jaw reminds him, before he can think of some smartass reply, that he's going to carry buckets of fruit, goddamn himself.

Jaehyun looks pale, tired. Taeyong, taking pity, offers him one of those giant bottles of water he'd bought from Donghyuck and murmurs, "Don't lift if you're dehydrated, you'll get a muscle cramp."

"Yeah, alright," Jaehyun agrees, a bit clammy too, cracking into the sport cap with his teeth and drinking about half of it in one go. A little dribble catches, drags down his chin, and as Jaehyun offers him the same bottle, Taeyong wonders if there could possibly be any more refreshing sight, even if his thirst isn't quite quenched. "C'mon, we're a little late."

"Late?" Taeyong echoes, mystified how Jaehyun even _knows_ that, seeing as he doesn’t seem to own a phone, or a clock, or anything helpful at all. At least not that Taeyong's seen, and he's been looking for any sign of civilisation from this man since they'd met a little over an hour ago. He doesn't ask even though his tongue itches to do so. Instead he lifts a bushel of peaches out of the back of the truck, sagging under its weight, and drags it to the front door of a quaint-looking farmhouse. The definition of 'quaint' is loose, but he likes it all the same.

The door opens after a minute, and a sketchy-looking blond peeks out, eyes wide, clearly in the middle of a mouthful of food. "Whatchu want?" asks the blond.

Jaehyun, thankfully, is right there, cutting into any and all awkwardness Taeyong could incur. "Woo," he says fondly, and the blond exits the doorframe to wrap Jaehyun in an impossibly huge hug. "Hey, m'glad you're here. I was gunna leave these out back in the barn if you weren't home."

Taeyong isn't sure he doesn't imagine it, but Jaehyun's slick southernness slips, just for a second. Again, he doesn't ask the questions that rattle his teeth the same way Jaehyun rattles his lungs. He glances down at the basket in his hands, jiggles it in what he hopes is something like enticement. "Where do you want 'em?" he asks, aware how sharp he sounds, how icy. Back to being the cold bitch.

"Back where Jaehyun wanted 'em to be," says the man Jaehyun had called Woo. "The barn's 'round the house." His accent is softer, rounder, and Taeyong hates to say it but it sort of matches him. "Where'd he pick you up?"

"Oh, round 'bout Dacula," Jaehyun singsongs when Taeyong doesn’t have an answer, lifting his bushel and hefting it around the corner, careful of the steps that lead off the veranda, clearly familiar with how they threaten underfoot. Taeyong is less familiar, and wobbles precariously, but catches himself at the last second. A couple peaches tumble over the edge, hitting the ground, and Jaehyun instructs sternly, "Leave 'em."

Taeyong doesn't have to be told twice.

There is, in fact, a rather impressive barn out back, its doors hanging wide open. There doesn't seem to be any sign of animal life, but then, the property is huge, sprawled out beyond the barn, and Taeyong doesn't see as well as he used to, blaming it on the alcohol and whatever else he uses for excuses these days.

Inside there are a couple metal barrels connected to tubes. Taeyong, not familiar with any kind of anything, doesn't think to question it. "Right here?" he asks, standing in a patch of hay directly next to a bare spot of flooring that he indicates with a pointed nod of his head.

Woo's floated into the barn carrying peaches of his own, one hanging out of his open mouth like he hadn't been eating about two seconds ago. "Yeah, s'fine," he says, muffled by the fruit in his mouth. "Thanks."

Jaehyun sets his down first, and Taeyong follows suit. They make a couple trips from barn to truck and back; between the three of them it's sweaty work, but quick, efficient. All the while Jaehyun and Woo chatter, and there's something familiar and beautiful in the way they make effortless conversation about someone Woo's probably dating or married to, Jaehyun asking after their job, whether or not they’ll be home tonight. Taeyong stays silent, always the outsider, focuses on his task, sure his hands are going to callous between a few barrels of his own. He wonders for a second how long Jaehyun's been delivering fruit.

"M'goin' out west," says Jaehyun, in a lull of conversation that happens when they're finished and Woo is ushering them into the house, insistent on "a li'l of that southern hospitality I know you like so much," says he, giving Jaehyun a look. The door clicks shut behind them. A cat winds itself around Taeyong's ankles, meowing softly in greeting.

"What in the hell d’you mean, out west?" Woo asks, pulling them into a tiny kitchen barely big enough for one ass, let alone three grown men asses. Taeyong shifts uncomfortably in the background as Woo pours them each a shot of something clear and smelling suspiciously of peaches. Suddenly the metallic contraption in the barn makes sense. "What're you gunna do?" He offers one glass each to Jaehyun and Taeyong, at whom he smiles, so warm it's like being in the late-evening sunshine all over again.

"Business," Jaehyun answers, and it looks a little like his mood is sour. He takes his shot in one go, and Taeyong is fascinated: Jaehyun's eyes water, but he doesn't choke like Taeyong does when he does the same.

Woo is kind enough to beat him across the back while he coughs the burn out of his esophagus. "You can't just tell me 'business' like it means somethin', Jaehyun," he says darkly, eyes narrowing as he rubs Taeyong's back, now, soothing. As if seeing with new eyes, Taeyong glances around, notices the decor, the framed photographs of Jungwoo with what appears to be a younger, taller man. Not that Taeyong's a great judge of that.

"It means somethin' to me," Jaehyun states, final, putting on a stiff upper lip.

They get drunk in quiet, the chatter not nearly as familiar or enticing as before. Good, Taeyong thinks bitterly. At least he doesn’t have to be the only unfriendly one here.

Woo makes the two of them dinner: southern fried chicken, homemade biscuits, a dessert of strawberry shortcake without those weird spongy shells Taeyong’s accustomed to seeing. There’s something comely about having dinner with strangers in a living room, and about the house, and about Woo himself that makes Taeyong think maybe the south isn’t as deadly as he had thought it might be. Lord knows he’d come out here to give up on poor decisions and, really, decision-making in general. All through dinner, and with dessert, they drink more of Woo’s fruit-flavoured moonshine, every drink a different berry.

"So," Taeyong slurs, when they're together outside under a thin sliver of the moon, he tapping at the pack of cigarettes he'd bought earlier only to realise he hadn't brought along a lighter.

"So?" Jaehyun echoes, and his honey-sweet tone is starting to chafe, if in a bearable way. The pain before the plunge, Taeyong supposes, unwrapping his cigarettes even if he can’t seem to smoke one.

"You brought him peaches so he could make liquor out of it." It isn't really a question, so he doesn't phrase it as one. Jaehyun's right there, plucking a matchbox from behind some flowerpot on a patio table and offering it to Taeyong. "You didn't tell me you were secretly from 1924."

"M'not," Jaehyun replies with a grin, wobbling as he plops down into his own seat, “it’s a family business, probably that old, but he’s legit.” He doesn't have anything else to say, it seems, instead focused on the gentle twinkle of the stars overhead. Good thing about country areas, they let navigation be natural. 

They stay like this in silence, Taeyong puffing at his cigarette like he hopes it'll take the drunk right out of him. "You two seem really close."

"Maybe." Jaehyun drags a hand along his nape. "What's it t'you?" He too catches in the silver light, and his profile is breathtaking, but Taeyong's too weak in the knees already for his body to do much more of that type of work. The combination of alcohol and hard labour, however brief, has been too much for his city-bound body.

"Nothing, really," mutters Taeyong, filling himself up with smoke. "Are we leaving tonight?"

"Maybe. F’we sober up in time. I know you're prolly not used to all that stuff he was feeding you in there."

"I think I'm stronger than I look." And Taeyong's still tipsy, even if his mood has gotten a little sour over the past few minutes. He raises his arm and rolls up the sleeve of his oversized t-shirt to show off what muscles he's managed to develop between bouts of heavy drinking. The smoke trails from between his parted lips, puffing when he speaks. "Don't you think I'm strong?"

"I’un think two ways about it." Every twang makes Taeyong lean in closer, til his elbows are planted on his knees and he's twiddling the mostly-burnt filter of his cigarette between his finger and his thumb, not so much smoking as he is _observing_. He doesn't think he's good at much, but learning people's a skill that's taken him years to develop, and he'll be damned if he doesn't take at least that much pride. "I've only known you for less'n a day."

And here Taeyong had been hoping for a laugh. He frowns, looking like a swamp creature, all furrowed brows and slanted mouth. "I guess that's fair." But there's something about Jaehyun that draws Taeyong closer all the same, despite his previous attitude. Must be something about watching him talk with a friend, show some sort of intimacy with another human being, even if that person isn't Taeyong himself.

In the end, he decides to keep his distance. "Where are we going after this?" he asks, looking around for someplace to drop the butt of his cigarette.

"M'not sure. Woo's supposed to load me up with a bunch of his stuff." He must see the panic rise in Taeyong's eyes, despite the darkness looming over them, heavy enough to crack either of their spines. "Don't worry, we're not crossin' state lines with it or anythin'. I wouldn't make you break the law no matter how much gas y'paid for. But then we’ll prolly make our way to Alabama, like I was tellin’ you earlier."

"I guess," shrugs Taeyong, finally giving up and pinching the unlit butt between his fingers, rolling it into unrecognisability. He doesn't really care about breaking the law, having done it himself on starving nights and days when the shakes had been too much for him to handle. A shame he couldn't steal anything else, like a doctor's visit. His mom would've been happier for it. "Hey, how old are you?"

Jaehyun laughs, quiet, shoulders shaking and little squeaks leaving his barely-open mouth. "Old enough," he answers after a long bout of that. "You don't seem like y'care a whole lot about me or mine, and that's fine. Don't need to be friends to be business partners, right?"

"Is that what we are?" Amusement lilts in Taeyong's voice, so subtle he doesn't even notice himself leaning sideways with it. "Business partners?"

"F’r now," is all Jaehyun will say. He stands up, stretches his legs. "I changed my mind. Y'wanna sleep in the house or in the truck?"

"Huh?" Who the fuck would want to sleep in the truck? It isn't even a safety thing, although the fringes of Taeyong's consciousness tug anxiously at that; it's more about the comfort.

"I'll take the truck then." And that's all he says about it, leaving Taeyong alone on the porch, he rocking back so far in his chair it nearly tips out from under him. There’s something too quick about the way Jaehyun smiles. "Ask Woo where to sleep. He'll show you the guest room, no problem."

When he's regained balance and his head isn't spinning with the image of Jaehyun walking away, the way his curves and edges seem to shine beneath the moon even as dark as she is, Taeyong pulls himself from his seat, wanders back into the house. It takes a minute for him to wrest open the door, and the damn thing makes a loud noise as he finally gets it to work, but no one seems to mind.

Sleep settles over the house even when its occupants keep vigilant watch. Woo -- Jungwoo, actually, Taeyong learns as they both sort of half-assedly amble through the house, making several serpentine paths -- apologises immediately for the unmade bed, a dozen times softer than he'd ever been with Jaehyun tonight. "It's just, y'know, usually Jaehyun doesn't stay...slipperier'n a greased-up goat, that one...so I wasn't ready for anyone to spend the night..."

Taeyong resists the need to ask what that even means. Jungwoo rifles through a curtained-off linen closet, draws back with armfuls of homemade quilts that look older than the both of them put together. He wonders if they came from Jungwoo's grandma, or some thrift store where everything seems forgotten. "It's fine," Taeyong says, and that urge to placate is back, though he can't say where it comes from -- Jungwoo seems to be doing fine on his own, comforting himself in half-assed mumbles as he leads Taeyong into a bedroom. In his own messy way he drapes sheets over the naked mattress, then covers those in blankets.

"It's not cold or anythin'," points out Jungwoo in something of a pleading tone. "I figured it'd be more comfortable, m'too drunk to...to..." He stares at the ceiling while he gestures toward the bed, words stuck beneath his liquor-heavy tongue. "You alright? You need anythin’?" he asks, finally giving up the ghost on proper communication. There’s something unbearably sad about him. Taeyong doesn’t know what to call it, so he doesn’t address it, tucking it between his teeth in case he needs it for later.

"I'll be fine, Woo," says Taeyong, and despite all his efforts to be the stony one in whatever relationship Jaehyun's dragged him into, he reaches into the distance between the pair of them and holds Jungwoo in his spindly arms, figuring that’s better than asking questions Jungwoo might not feel like answering.

Jungwoo melts under it, butter on a warm night when he holds Taeyong right back, and for that minute, everything is strange and perfect. When Jungwoo pads out of the guest room, down the hall, Taeyong is left feeling like Alice when she finally sits down at the tea party -- confused beyond reason, but happy to sit down.

///

Morning comes far too soon for Taeyong's liking, dawn cresting at what must be before six but realistically couldn't be. He'll say it's his internal clock being fucked up from all the drinking. Outside cicadas and crickets are still singing their summer songs, a counter-melody provided by the waking whippoorwills; the sound of it fills him from the dead-center of his being. Somehow he'd gotten tangled in the myriad blankets Jungwoo'd given him the night before. His legs are trapped in a fabric tortilla and though he tries to kick out of it, his head feels exactly as it did the day previous: dry, heavy, unsatisfied.

At least he remembers the night before, he tells himself, consolation.

But then he thinks of Jaehyun, probably asleep in the bed of a truck, and there's something like guilt replacing the nature sounds settling heavy in his belly.

Jungwoo isn't awake, and apparently that's for the best because the house is trailed with various flat sheets and little cloth blankets here and there, photos taken down off the wall, a cell phone abandoned face-up on the coffee table and in the middle of a six-hour call. Taeyong gets the sense that he slept through a tragedy of some kind, but he's grateful to have been given that opportunity. He barely deals with his own shit well.

He finds Jungwoo’s charger, borrows it, just for a little while, just until he can feel like he’s not alone in the world. Not that it matters: All the friends he’d left in Florida haven’t been answering his messages for weeks.

He rifles through kitchen cabinets silently, unsure what kind of sleeper Jungwoo is, unwilling to go wake Jaehyun to let him know it's time to move on. From the tap he gets a glass of water, and though the taste at the back of his throat is metallic, he figures it's better than the bottle of moonshine sitting beside the double sink with the fake crystal knobs.

After his water's gone, he takes a swig anyway, in case there's a headache creeping round the corner.

He sits on the veranda in the same chair as he had the night before, wondering what the hell 'going out west' had meant, and if he's invited to go on that particular sojourn. Though he wouldn't object to staying here, making friends with Jungwoo, picking up a pretty goddamn valuable skill for a drunk such as himself, Taeyong hasn't been to California in years, and even getting halfway there would be better than not going that way at all. It's in the middle of his second cigarette of the morning that Jaehyun wanders up, having removed an overshirt in the middle of the night. He stands there staring up at the glowing morning sky.

Taeyong's mouth is dry all over again, but he can't really blame it on the alcohol.

"Woo up?" Jaehyun asks, and he's still thick with sleep, his eyes still heavy. Taeyong shakes his head. "You up?"

"I could use coffee," Taeyong confesses, a weird lump rising in his throat. Jaehyun, nodding, disappears into the house, presumably to do at least one of those things and, more importantly, leave Taeyong to his own thoughts. Which is fine. Taeyong's gotten to be alright at blocking those out when he needs to, though it escapes his notice that he's doing it more often.

When Jaehyun returns a full ten minutes later, he's got two steaming mugs of coffee in his hands, and he sets one down before Taeyong, his place at the table cosier now that he's hit with the smell of the brew. "Iunno how you take it," Jaehyun confesses, taking the opposite seat, the grating sound of the chair dragging against the painted wood rubbing at what few nerves Taeyong currently has. "I just sorta..."

"It's fine." It's black. That is not fine. Taeyong takes a sip anyway, and at least it's spiked with way too much sugar for a normal human to ingest. He flinches when it hits his tongue anyway, too hot and too bitter.

"Woo's gunna help me load up the truck with some bottles, and we're gonna drive 'bout an hour and a half away. Do you mind drivin'?"

"Not at all," Taeyong replies, smooth, and chokes down another sip of his coffee, dreaming awake of cream and marshmallows. "Is, uh, is he okay?" Jaehyun wrinkles his brow confused, and Taeyong clarifies by jerking his head toward the house a foot behind him.

"Oh...it gets like that, sometimes, when his man's out and about runnin' and gunnin' the country." Jaehyun smiles like it's some kind of shady cabal. "He's a state trooper. Takes a lotta long shifts."

Taeyong doesn't know what to say about this, and it's probably for the better, because Jungwoo wanders, barefoot and shirtless, out onto the veranda, wincing at the sight of the two of them in jest. "Y'all look like hell," he drawls, clearly not awake enough to fuck with them but doing it nonetheless. "Jae, here, especially. 'Least Yongie got to sleep in a real bed like a real person."

Jaehyun glowers, but doesn't say anything, and Taeyong has the consideration to follow suit.

"Anyway, I'm not lettin' the two of you leave without eatin' something." Jungwoo's all fond, and soft, and it suits him better than the human disaster he'd been the night before, trailing blankets and photographs in his wake. "We got deer sausage, buckwheat pancakes, and a li'l bit of that spiked syrup you liked so much last time I saw you." He nudges Jaehyun's statue-still form. "I'll give you some for the road, case the two of you need to stop over someplace on your trip out west. And don't try'n tell me you aren't hungry. Your boy here--" Now it's Taeyong's turn to glower, though he can't figure out what's worse: the implication that he's a boy, or that he's Jaehyun's, "looks like he hasn't had a good meal all his life."

Taeyong must actively stop himself from reaching under his shirt and feeling his ribs. At least Jungwoo isn't wrong about one thing: Taeyong would, in this case, consider himself starving.

///

They don’t end up leaving until the middle of the afternoon, Jungwoo’s company too polite to pass on. It’s been too long since Taeyong had been around people that he enjoyed. Jaehyun was questionable on the likability part, when it was just the two of them, but Jungwoo made up the difference.

All the while he gives Taeyong significant looks, and Taeyong is distinctly reminded of friends who aren’t really friends and set people up on blind dates. He wonders what Jungwoo’s actual expectation is, and what Taeyong’s supposed to make of it. He’s never been good at shouldering the expectations of others, at least in his own estimation, but people tend to give credit where it isn’t due.

Jungwoo sees them off the front porch. On the way out they see a car pulling in, marked STATE TROOPER in officious letters. Taeyong’s forced to think that’s the man in all the photos Jungwoo had left strewn across the tiny house in his drunken depression, but doesn’t get a good enough look to say one way or the other.

Later, when they're on the road, Taeyong glances over to see Jaehyun, dozed off and peaceful, the wind whistling into the cab of the truck fluttering his hair this way and that. His hands are folded over his stomach and he's slouched down so far in the bench seat it's a wonder he doesn't fall out of his belt and into the floor. The only thing that seems to keep him upright is the fact that his legs are stupidly long, his feet planted firmly on the floor.

It takes a lot not to wreck the truck out of sheer clumsiness, but Taeyong makes it.

He's got his GPS set to their next destination, some coordinate set that Jaehyun had rattled off with ease. It's a pretty straightforward route, he notes -- follow one freeway until you come to a cluster of backwoods country roads, same as when they'd gone to Woo's place, except Jaehyun’s the one dozing off in the passenger’s seat.

In the truck bed rattles a bunch of glass jugs, strapped in as best they could be and covered with a thick, dark tarpaulin. "The moon don't like the sun," Jungwoo had joked as he and Jaehyun were loading the bottles into the backseat, playing at his own accent in a way that had Taeyong laughing harder than he'd laughed in months, maybe years. "Y'gotta keep 'em in the dark ‘til you get where you're goin' or else they won't taste right."

Taeyong thinks about the stonefruit moonshine, the way it had tickled his senses and then knocked him clean over his head, brutish and delicious. Whoever’s getting this is a lucky son of a bitch. He promises himself he won’t steal any for his own gratification, though it takes a couple tries, a lot of convincing.

When they pull up to wherever they’re going -- and fuck, it really is a wherever, a gutted shack even uglier than the outside of Jungwoo’s place, worse still than the convenience store there ‘bout Dacula -- Taeyong parks the truck carefully, not wanting to have to pull a truck out of a mud pit a few hours from now. He reaches across the space between the two of them and gently shakes Jaehyun by the shoulder. "Hey, it says we're here..." he mumbles, finding his tongue a little heavy when it hasn't been used since before the sun hung high and shadeless in the sky.

Jaehyun startles, and there's something so fucking _tired_ about him that Taeyong almost regrets being so defensive the day before, if only because the instinct to care kicks in at the most inconvenient times. He's been coached well over the years, after all. "Are you going to be alright?" he asks, stiff.

After receiving a grunt in response, the pair of them haul themselves out of the truck and into the back. "Who's here?" Taeyong questions as he's lifting two jugs, one in each hand.

"Hopefully no one," Jaehyun murmurs. "There hardly ever is, here."

"How long have you been doing this?" They make their way around the dilapidated shack as it threatens to crumble at their mere concerted effort at breath. "Running things around, I mean."

"Since I could drive," Jaehyun replies easily. "How long have you been washing up on riverbanks?"

It shouldn't sting, but Taeyong finds it does anyway, and hefts the combined weight of himself and the liquor into what looks like an empty greenhouse, its glass walls chipped and cracked in a way that makes him afraid for the alcohol. The moon doesn't like the sun, he remembers, air trapped in his throat, unwilling to escape. The silence between himself and Jaehyun falls lightly on his shoulders.

"My mom died," Taeyong says after a long while, when their task is done and he's using stolen matches to light up a cigarette that Jaehyun irreverently plucks from between his lips. "Hey, give that back."

Jaehyun stomps the smoke out and shakes his head. "Don't do that," he says. "Please. Not while you talk t'me 'bout your dead mom."

Taeyong's skin, carved with concern, crawls with craving, with cravenness, not so much scared of anything Jaehyun does as the intensity with which he does so, the severity in his eyes. "Alright," he says, thinking of the remaining half-pack he's got stashed in his back pocket, rumpled with too long sitting in the truck and no place to keep them.

"Your mom?" Jaehyun prompts when the quiet stretches on a beat too long, when Taeyong's eyes drift to the shape of the man standing before him. He clears his throat.

"We lived in Florida. Now she doesn't live anywhere." Taeyong laughs, a dry thing. "She had me spread her over this fishing spot her grandfather used to go to once in awhile." His mouth forms a thin line, pressed into worry. "Mostly she just blew away, but a little of her was there in the water."

"What happened to her?" The curiosity in Jaehyun's eyes is muted, but undeniable.

"Cancer," and here Taeyong manages a crack of a smile, sure he'll fissure under the pressure to have a conversation when his heart aches for an embrace he'll never get. "I took care of her until she didn't need taking care of."

"What'll happen to you?" Around them, the greenhouse seems to be bowing in on itself, listening intently to their conversation; it makes Taeyong shiver, despite the midday warmth swathing him.

"I don't know. I have a dad in California. Haven't seen him in years." He pauses. "He doesn't matter, though. I'm old enough."

"That's what you said last time." Jaehyun swats at a mosquito that seems intent on nibbling at his neck. When he draws his hand away it's stained red. Poor thing must've been starving, thinks Taeyong absently, seeing as there's no one else around. "Tell me somethin' else."

He thinks about this a long time, raising his hand to his mouth and biting down on a knuckle to stave off the need to fill himself with smoke. "You know enough," he decides aloud, words muffled by the flesh beneath his teeth. "Tell me something first."

"I'm 19," Jaehyun says easily, and though he’s airy about it, same as he is practically everything else, it sounds to Taeyong’s ear like their conversation is over. He goes back to the truck, returns with the tarp they'd used to keep the moonshine safe and drapes it over the bottles. "They'll stay here until tonight, probably."

Uneasy, Taeyong nods, and leads the way back to their truck, sliding easily into the driver's seat. Jaehyun looks like he's ready to protest, but Taeyong shakes his head stoutly. "No, you're exhausted. I don't want to wake up wrapped around a tree or anything."

Again, there's something too sharp, too quick about the grin Jaehyun puts on, a direct contradiction to the honey-smooth way in which he speaks. "Alright. You drive. Where are we going?"

Taeyong shrugs. "We need gas, right? Probably something to eat before the day’s out. And then we'll be out of money, I think." His mind is connecting the dots quicker than his mouth can catch up, but the one thing of which he's certain is that they need some more cash to hold them over out here in the backwoods. Something in him is convinced that whatever store they find is going to think Jaehyun's card is witchcraft. The thought draws a tired chuckle from Taeyong's lungs.

"Do you know how to make money?" Jaehyun says when he inches into the car, long legs dragging.

"Yeah, of course. How the fuck do you think I got to the middle of nowhere?" Taeyong turns the key in the ignition brow furrowed as the tired engine rumbles to life before them. "No, wait, don't answer that."

Jaehyun laughs all the winding way out of the middle of nowhere, clutching at his gut, tears in his eyes. Maybe, just maybe, Taeyong laughs too.

///

Eventually, the rumbling in his stomach is too much for even him to bear, and his head aches too badly in all its noisy begging for something burning and alcoholic in his system. He pulls over onto the side of a mostly abandoned road. The only distraction is the occasional passing car, driving at least 40 over the speed limit, not that there are many signs back here in the middle of nowhere. Taeyong seems to recall having passed one of those welcome signs, letting him know their travels had taken them over state lines, but he can't be sure when he was the one driving.

The lack of motion seems to wake Jaehyun from his sleep. "What's up?" he says, slurred with sleep, the molasses in his accent having frozen over, making him something rigid and wary. "What's happening?"

Taeyong chalks it up to exhaustion, gracious as he's ever been. "I'm hungry and I need a drink. Do you know how to find a bar out here?"

Jaehyun grumbles, leans his temple against the window Taeyong had rolled up to defend against the hordes of mosquitoes that had threatened his life. "You've gotta phone," he points out.

"It's dead. You don't have a charger in here as far as I know. I let it die and figured I'd ask someone the next spot we were at." He sets his face in stone, and stares Jaehyun in his half-woken eyes, actively trying not to take his hands off the idling steering wheel. It seems to shake beneath his touch. He wonders if it's his touch doing the shaking instead. "I need to eat. I need a drink. Is there someplace nearby?"

Jaehyun lifts a disaffected shoulder and Taeyong wants to throttle him for a split second. "Prolly f’you go out that way." He points down the road, wrist curving to show some turn Taeyong can't see. The horehound is back in Jaehyun's voice, and Taeyong must admit he's relieved to hear it, to know that someone with a clear head is in charge of this operation. "Lemme drive. Y'look tired."

He slides across the bench as Jaehyun circles round the front of the truck, fingers skirting its hood only to jerk back, the heat of the overworked engine searing his skin. Taeyong watches him take those fingers into his mouth, and he needs a drink anew.

It's difficult, Taeyong realises after awhile, to watch the scenery instead of the company. He regrets his rudeness the day before, and that guilt churns his guts more than the hunger does.

They pass by one-room churches with broken down signs and open doors, homes on sprawling properties in sizes Taeyong can't begin to fathom, abandoned banks with obvious signs of some water damage and probably a little spare change inside, and more cows than he cares to count. The air smells cleaner here than it'd been on the river, or in Florida, or anywhere Taeyong's ever been, not that that deters from the scent of paddies in the slightest. He doesn't love the country, of course, the idea of someone dismembering him and scattering the remaining pieces across the foothills of Appalachia until no one would ever recognise him always at the forefront of his thoughts. But he does love this, and he'd have to be senseless to write it off because it's backwoods and there isn't a soul in sight.

Eventually Jaehyun has to cut on the headlights, and Taeyong is grateful to be able to watch the passing of faded divider lines on the highway. It distracts him from the other things that well up, blood from an open wound, when there's too much quiet.

"Does the radio work in this thing?" he asks after way too much silence.

"Nope," Jaehyun answers, and rolls down his window a fraction, so that the truck is filled with whistling noises. Taeyong likes the noise, even if the one-sidedness of it makes his ears pop. He cracks his own, and the pressure relieves, and he inhales deeply the scent of _country_, of a freshness that can't be explained. "D'you have a preference in bar?"

"There's more than one kind?" Taeyong deadpans.

"Course," Jaehyun snorts, slowing the truck to take an enormous curve. "Pool hall. Biker bar. Country western, though I think those're more in Texas than they are here. S'a few I've seen in Georgia--" he drawls the word, a perfect imitation of the Savannah that had lived in his friend Woo's voice, "but mostly they're further west. There's nightclubs, gamblin' clubs, straight bars, gay bars..."

Taeyong, who realises how poor his attempt at joking had been, blames his lack of humour on his lack of alcohol. He wants to shrink into the seat and disappear, at least until the last suggestion offered him. "If you can find me a fuckin' gay bar in the middle of the mountains in Georgia, I will pay you in..."

The quiet comes back, but there's a tension to it that hadn't been there before.

"Kisses?" Jaehyun suggests, mirth glinting in his eyes, even in profile.

"Do you _want_ kisses?" Taeyong asks, so quietly that it's almost as if he's speaking to himself and not the entire other person in this truck with him. He had forgotten his seatbelt somewhere in the driver's exchange, and now he's busy drawing in on himself, knees tucked beneath his chin, making himself as small as he possibly can be, a high-pitched ringing starting to sound in the back of his head. He wants to insist it can't be what Jaehyun wants, but something along the way has taught him he's no mind reader.

"Not really," Jaehyun says, but it doesn't feel true.

The stars are the only light in the sky when they do manage to find a bar, a pool hall the likes of which Taeyong's familiar with; he breathes in the lingering scent of cigarette smoke, wishes Jaehyun hadn't made a big deal out of it this morning, and shoulders his way in through the front doors, his business partner in tow.

And, alright, he looks like he doesn't belong here. That works against him. Every burly fucker in this joint glances up from their beer to look in Taeyong's direction, a couple of them tipping their hats. It seems to make them angrier that their girlfriends notice the two men entering their supposedly sacred space, tip their hats coquettishly, big fake grins on their faces.

Taeyong saunters up to the bar, orders each of them a drink, and he can't tell which he's more grateful over -- the whiskey tipping down his throat, burning on the way down, aided by lime juice, or the fact that he can see movement from behind the bar, signaling to him a kitchen. Hot food sounds good. His stomach groans in protest at the sudden introduction of alcohol. He ignores it completely to lean against the dull wood of the bar itself, staring into the gentle throngs of people gathered around this billiards table or that gambling table.

"You any good at cards?" Jaehyun asks, nursing his drink, like he's not sure whether or not he should be having any.

Taeyong shrugs. "Better at pool." He cracks a wicked smile. "I'm gonna try and get us more money." He skips a beat, giving Jaehyun a sideways glance. "Are _you_ any good at cards?"

"Depends on the game. Guess I can find out whether it applies to whatever they're playing."

It's the most they've talked since this morning, and that haunts Taeyong as he approaches the billiards table, looking for someone fucking _gullible_ to chat up.

The bartender asks Taeyong whether or not he wants to start a tab. She doesn't ask for his ID. He's actually kind of grateful, but then again, people don't seem to enjoy very much taking cards out here in the southern wasteland, so maybe it's courtesy of the cash burning a hole in Taeyong's pocket.

He spots his mark from across the room: a pretty skinny looking guy with bigass ears, handsome if that's the kind of handsome you're into, a leather jacket seemingly in ignorance of the heat gently simmering outside the air-conditioned confines of the bar walls. His leather is real, and looks fairly new, and Taeyong takes him for someone with money, judging by the way he keeps the dude sitting next to him in top-shelf liquor despite not drinking himself. Good, thinks Taeyong. He might be a hustler and a shameless one at that, but even he’s got morals, and taking advantage of the drunk is something he cautions himself against at all times.

Taeyong doesn't approach immediately, bides his time until it's less strange he's here and more strange that he's not talking to anyone. He finishes his first drink. He orders himself another. He's steady for the first time in several hours, remembering too late the drink he could've had riding shotgun for Jaehyun, the tiny bottle of moonshine tucked under the seat.

Oh well, he thinks, sauntering up to the pool-playing, circling his mark slowly, and eventually playing a game all by himself, albeit pretty badly. He holds the tip of his cue between fingers that grip too tightly, and misses most of his shots, and at one point actually knocks the cue ball off the table.

It rolls toward his mark. Taeyong offers a sheepish grin, cheeks burning, and so fucking what if it's the side effect of the alcohol? No one knows but him; he’s watched every head in this joint to make sure no one paid too much attention to what he was doing.

The guy traps the rolling cue ball under the toe of his bike-riding boot, the stretch of leather soft but noticeable. Real shit. Good shit. Taeyong fights to keep the confidence from his face.

"You lost something," says the guy, bending to pick the ball from the floor, offer it back in Taeyong's direction.

Taeyong, still playing at embarrassment, scrubs the back of his neck, praying to whatever God is out there that he doesn’t look _too_ young and dumb. “Yeah, thanks,” he mumbles, taking the cue ball and placing it back on the table in completely the wrong spot. He takes a shot, its messiness aided by the fact that the world keeps threatening to tip out from beneath his feet, and manages to sink one ball: the bright-orange-striped 13. It wobbles precariously at the edge of the pocket, but falls in all the same. 

He makes a noise of victory, louder than he might were he on his shit. 

His ball rescuer looks unamused, folding his arms over his chest. “Who’re you?” he asks, glancing around, keeping his voice low, and Taeyong’s forced to wonder what secrets are hiding beneath the creaking leather of that jacket or, better yet, in the guy’s partner’s lovely, long hair.

Taeyong introduces himself, though none too gracefully. He’s playing it up at this point, the calm of pulling a grift something that sings in his blood until he feels it in every cell, every molecule. “Was wondering if you’d like to play a round with me. My partner decided he wasn’t interested.”

“Your partner, huh,” and the guy with the ears grins, a boxy thing, the sort that Taeyong might find charming if this were another life and he were another version of himself. “Didn’t know you could get much of that out here.” He offers a hand, and it doesn’t escape Taeyong how delicate he looks, or how slowly he speaks, probably choosing each word the way a judge chooses verdicts for fear of ruining the wrong person’s life. “Sicheng. I’ll play but only if you’ve got cash up front.”

The guy with Sicheng, who’s yet to be named, doesn’t seem to like this very much, and in fact regards Taeyong with a suspicion that’s almost enough to be admired. Taeyong is no stranger to this, and flashes a stink eye of his own, twirling his cue between his fingers in a way he knows makes him look too dumb to steal from someone. 

They begin with cash at the corner pocket, few words exchanged. Taeyong wonders if maybe this is a bad idea, judging by the gentle churning of his insides. He wonders where Jaehyun got off to, if maybe he needs backup, in case this scheme manages to take a turn for the worst. 

Sicheng breaks, and Taeyong is immediately left with solids. He biffs his first shot intentionally, scratches, gives the cue to Sicheng to set wherever he feels like. He doesn’t get the feeling that Sicheng is smug about his clear advantage, but he doesn’t feel pitied either, and while he’d prefer the former to the latter the lack of either unsettles him.

A couple more bad shots, one in which he sinks the bright yellow 1 ball, center pocket, an easy shot but not great for the long game since it leaves the cue ball in a position to get at least two if not more. Sicheng smiles, placid and cool, and for the first time running this scheme Taeyong starts to sweat, sure he won’t be able to run double or nothing even if he does suddenly get good.

He is good, he reminds himself, stubborn in the way he sets his jaw and watches with dread as Sicheng pockets three in one shot.

It's fine. This is fine. This is how they're going to pay for what's sure to be an extensive bar tab, but they're going to be fine. That's the mantra he keeps repeating to himself.

All at once, while Taeyong is lining up his next shot -- he's practised at tricks, he reminds himself, and this is no different -- he's wrapped up in a warmth that he can't begin to imagine. There are lips against his ear. "You ever hustled like this before?" a honeyed accent whispers, and Taeyong, not wanting to give too much away, nods in the stiffest way he can, his eyes locked not on the line of his potential shot but rather the way Sicheng and his still-unnamed friend seem to be giggling at him from behind their hands. "Good. I'm here to help f'you'll let me." It's flirtatious in the worst way, Taeyong's intestines twisting anxiously, but he's relieved when Jaehyun drifts away.

He focuses on his shot, and makes it, a miracle involving a hopping cue. Jaehyun, meanwhile, is talking up Sicheng's friend, and it's impossible not to overhear when Taeyong's been drawn to his voice and very little else the last day and a half. "I just don't think it's right that you're takin' advantage of my friend like this," he's saying, and Taeyong is so rapt with attentiveness that Sicheng has to gently bump him out of the way so he can make his own shot.

Taeyong shakes his head, a little sigh escaping him. If he'd _wanted_ to pull a two-man con he'd have said as much.

He sidles over to Jaehyun regardless, taps him on the shoulder as he goes on about the lost virtue of the South, like it means anything to anyone, least of all the crowd in this biker bar. "What happened at the card table?" he asks in Jaehyun's ear, all too aware of the colour bubbling up in his skin, the obvious embarrassment he's feeling.

"They kicked me off," Jaehyun says, none too subtle himself despite Taeyong's efforts to keep their conversation between the two of them. "Said I took too much of their money."

That fast? Taeyong's forced to wonder if Jaehyun is one of those that counts cards, and wishes he had the intellect required to do something like that himself. Or the patience, now that he's thinking about it. But it doesn't matter when he's got to line up his next shot, and Sicheng's just scratched, and he can position the cue ball wherever he wants. He makes a couple circles around the table, cue ball in hand, and blinks a couple times, confused. There are plenty of things Sicheng _could_ have done, but he scratched instead.

What the fuck? Did Jaehyun talking actually _do_ something for them?

It ends up that Taeyong wins, which had been his plan; he sinks the 8 with a flourish that might give up the game, if that were even a fear he had at this point. Sicheng and his companion look grateful just for the chance to get away from the table, and disappear into the opposite corner, lit cigarettes between their fingers and heads hung low.

Taeyong's focused on the way it'd felt to have Jaehyun's hand draped over his, else he'd probably be sceptical of that, too.

While his stack of bills had been mostly ones wrapped in a couple twenties, change from getting gas the day before, Sicheng's had been full, and it seems a little unfair. He approaches again from behind, taps Sicheng's friend on the shoulder, offers an apologetic glance, if an unsmiling one. "Hey, I think you paid me a little too much," he says softly, and hates that this side of him is coming out when his survival is on the line. "Can I get a light?" He feels his back pocket, remembers he'd ditched his own pack in the truck sometime this afternoon. "...And a cigarette?"

"I didn't pay you too much," Sicheng points out, offering his pack -- ugh, menthol -- and watching Taeyong intently. "I gave you what you deserved."

"No, I had a bunch of single--"

Sicheng's friend interrupts, now, impatience in his voice. "Just leave it alone. Consider it a charitable donation, if you think you didn't hustle us enough back there." There's something nervous in his energy, and he narrows his eyes up at Taeyong, who shrugs, lighting the smoke between his lips and breathing in the disgusting flavour of mint mingled with the calming scent of tobacco. “Do you mind leaving? This is kind of our spot and we don’t want any trouble…”

Taeyong’s always hated that phrase. He slumps, shoulders sagging, and rolls his neck a couple times. “Usually when people say that it’s because they want a fight. You two want a fight?” And shit, Taeyong’s been in a grand total of two fights in his entire life, but he looks Sicheng up and down, and then his friend, and he’s just drunk enough to think that he could take them both at the same time.

Fortunately, Jaehyun catches him right before he’s ready to roll up his t-shirt sleeves, and spins him on his axis, holds him by his shoulders so he doesn’t topple beneath the weight of his own bullshit. “We gotta go,” Jaehyun tells him seriously, and circles both hands around his wrists, dragging him along in a backward step. “Right now. I’m serious, Taeyong.”

Taeyong deeply regrets not having another drink. At least he’s got that extra moonshine under the seat.

When they’re outside, in the cicada-soundtracked night and Taeyong feels the definitive sting of a mosquito at the back of his neck, Jaehyun fixes him with...anger? Attraction? Even though the bar lights are catching those impossible angles in his face, Taeyong can’t figure out what’s playing behind the darkness and depth of Jaehyun’s impossible eyes, the edge in his usually smooth voice. “What the _fuck_ are you doing?” he demands, shoving Taeyong by the shoulder he’d gripped so avidly what feels like just a second ago. “You’re trying to get yourself killed?” His accent, the one Taeyong has found himself lost in the last day or so, is completely gone, and more to the point there’s something harsh lining his face, something much older than the 19 he claimed to be earlier today.

Taeyong quivers. His stomach threatens to revolt. “Can you drive?” he asks in the quietest voice. “I don’t think I’m okay to stop drinking yet.”

The lines smooth out like from beneath an iron, all the steam that Jaehyun had released from between his ears dissipating any and all disagreement they’re having. “Yeah,” he says in reply. “Yeah, I can drive.”

“And can you tell me how you know them?”

Jaehyun doesn’t say anything, and Taeyong takes this as a victory.

///

Taeyong’s mom taught him, however unintentionally, that conflict that leads to silence is the worst kind. He can remember, on the vague fringes of his memory, the few times in which his parents, still together and trying to make it work for his sake, would get into an argument. They would yell, not enough to disturb the peace but enough to upset Taeyong’s, and things would settle, dust on the moon, still suspended.

Sometimes he still looks up at the moon, wondering if that’s where the ghosts of all the unresolved fights had gone to rest, if that’s why she looks so heavy when she hangs full and bright in the evening sky.

The case now is no different: Taeyong, drunk enough to function but not enough to forget, skin crawling and the roots of his hair aching for some kind of touch-up (the vulnerability of imperfection nags at him, from time to time, and always in his mother’s voice), sits in the back of the truck. His legs are tucked beneath him, lending him the image of smallness he doesn’t often enjoy presenting, especially in the company of people he’s not entirely sure he knows. 

They’d gotten gas. They’d gotten snacks. Taeyong had gotten more to drink, having polished off the moonshine in no time at all after leaving, the phantom imprint of Jaehyun’s hand on his shoulder, on his wrists, burning holes into him where the memory of his whispering, husky voice cannot reach. Jaehyun is eating cheddar jalapeno Cheetos. Taeyong is happy to eat an entire sleeve of the round Nutter Butters he hadn’t been allowed to snack on much as a child; they taste of nostalgia and, vaguely, of dust collected over months of sitting on the shelf of a barely-staffed convenience store in the middle of nowhere.

Both of them are quiet, the only sound marking the space between them that of the bugs chirping, looking for companionship in the dark night. Occasionally an owl hoots, and Taeyong’s anxious mind, looking for a way out of this decidedly awkward situation, will tell him that the sound is actually someone deep in the woods, off the southbound side of the country highway, falling prey to someone they, too, did not know until the axe was buried inside their chest.

He eats another cookie. He breathes. He waits to die, his bones rattling inside his muscle and sinew as if to chatter the request into Jaehyun by sheer virtue of movement.

“I did know them,” says Jaehyun, but adds nothing for clarity’s sake, and Taeyong would very much like to reach into the chasm slowly forming between the pair of them to shake the secrets from Jaehyun’s pockets, if that’s even where he’s fool enough to keep them. Certainly they don’t stay heavily guarded in his heart. “I know a few people, up until about Texas, and then nothin’ at all until California.”

Taeyong’s heart skips an uneasy beat in his chest. He hates to think of California, of the father who’d refused him safe harbour in an uncertain world, of the arguments he’d always started because he’d been drinking and Taeyong’s mom had been too tired, too heartsick to fight back. Still, the thought of California by himself doesn’t sound so bad, at least in his estimation: If his mom isn’t around anymore she can’t tell him not to fistfight the man who’d pushed him out of a ball one sweaty night. She can’t tell him not to drink with him.

“I’m 20,” Taeyong says quietly, between sips of the fireball he’d decided to buy himself with his charitable donation. 

“You drink a lot for 20,” Jaehyun points out, worrying at the knee of his jeans with the blunt edge of a nail. Taeyong must move to protest, because Jaehyun shakes his head, discouraging argument. “S’fine, honestly. I used to. Just...don’t, anymore. Not for a long time.”

Unsure what to make of this, Taeyong makes himself be quiet by shoving the last of his cookies into his mouth, crinkling the sleeve noisily in his palm. The pause between them is too intentional. He breaks it with a question, quiver in his voice. "Why did you stop?"

Jaehyun smiles, and even though it's dark out -- the moon isn't anywhere near full enough to help Taeyong see much of anything -- the glint of his too-perfect teeth catches in the sliver of skylight beaming down on them from between the canopy of tree branches. "You haven't asked me anything, y'know," he points out, and Taeyong answers by reaching into the space between them, as little as it is in this truck bed, and thwaps Jaehyun on the shoulder. "I mean it! Other'n asking how old I am. You don't seem t'like askin' questions."

"I don't," Taeyong agrees, and sips at his fireball, actively ignoring the peanut butter backwash sloshing around in the bottle's bottom. "It gets people in trouble." He pauses, amends, "It gets me in trouble."

"What sorta trouble?" Jaehyun's eyes twinkle, and Taeyong wishes they had something, anything, some kind of light by which to see each other that didn't involve direct eye contact. He thinks about this for a moment, then plucks his phone from his back pocket, ignoring the way Jaehyun seems to watch the ungraceful bend of his knees as he lifts to do so. Taeyong turns on his phone screen, fiddles with the settings so it doesn't cut off, and places it between them. Makeshift campfire. His drunken heart is at ease.

Jaehyun doesn't seem to register an opinion, or if he does, it's not because he shows it on his face. Taeyong does his best not to shrug. "Every big question I've ever asked has led to someone leaving my life, one way or another."

"S'that why you're out sleepin' in parking lots alone?" Jaehyun's suspiciously devoid of judgment.

"Maybe." Taeyong hates the defensive edge that creeps into his voice, but Jaehyun doesn't seem to judge that, either. "I didn't do anything that you haven't already seen me do. I did work. Caught rides. Occasionally hustled people out of their drinking money by pretending to be bad at pool."

"I didn't mean to mess up your game," Jaehyun states softly.

"You didn't." It takes a herculean effort for Taeyong not to say the truth, which is that Jaehyun messed up everything _but_ that, and that Taeyong's still tingling, though the alcohol is helping dull the sensation, at least for the time being. "You said you knew them."

"Yeah, but," and here Jaehyun yawns, as if for emphasis, "you can ask me 'bout that tomorrow. You wanna sleep back here, or in the cab?"

The fact that he still offers, despite having slept in the elements the night before, does something to Taeyong's heart that can't be explained by his body. "I'll sleep back here," he finally says, after way too much quiet. "You take the cab. You'll be alright?" It isn't really a question, but he phrases it as one regardless, wanting nothing more than to get into the habit of asking questions, if he gets that same smile.

He doesn't know when he got so soft, if it's been lurking inside him the entire time, waiting to emerge at his most vulnerable hour.

Jaehyun mumbles something about being fine, and makes his slow way out of the truck bed, sliding across the bumps in the plastic, catching on the dropped tailgate at the last moment so he doesn't hit the earth beneath him when he finally breaks free. He turns back to Taeyong. "You sure?"

Taeyong just nods, and polishes off the rest of the bottle. "I'll probably pass out here in a minute."

Jaehyun reaches across the body of the bed itself, as if to touch Taeyong somehow, but Taeyong shrinks away a fraction, not sure what he'll get out of Jaehyun this late at night, when they're both delirious with a need for sleep. Frowning, Jaehyun disappears, the only sign that he's even still here the rattling of the truck beneath Taeyong's frame, the sound of the truck door closing quiet but firm.

He keeps himself in check, when he wants to tap on the slider glass and say goodnight. Sentimentality doesn't suit them, when there's no makeshift campfire between the two of them.

///

The good thing about being drunk on a fairly consistent basis, especially once the sun's gone down, is that it doesn't matter much where one is sleeping -- one is going to sleep like the dead and gone regardless. Taeyong, having taken full advantage of this, is fairly well-rested when the sun crests over the treetops, waking him with a waxing glint of gold. He groans, though, realising several things all at once: He's sweaty, he hasn't showered since God only knows how long ago, and his limbs feel like packing peanuts, all at once weightless, crackling, useless in practical application, since he's not using them to keep anything safe. He rolls onto one side, the lining of the truck bed digging into his seemingly delicate flesh, his bony elbows catching in the hollows between the ridges, everything around him discouraging him from getting up if he doesn't absolutely have to.

He does. The bad thing about being drunk on a fairly consistent basis is that one forgets the joy of peeing.

When he's finished with his business, still half out of it with sleep, he meanders back to the truck, taking his time, wondering if he'd eaten everything he'd bought at the store. Probably. Drunk Taeyong, he knows too well, is something of a forest fire. At least there's no steaming remains marking the trail he'd traced last night.

Except Jaehyun is snoring in the cab, knees lifted, hands folded over his stomach, the most peaceful he's looked in the two or so days they've known one another. There's something corpselike about him while he snoozes, and dissociation creeps up Taeyong's nape til he's watching himself watch Jaehyun sleep. He really does freak himself out sometimes.

He could use a drink, but he'd finished off what little he'd had the right mind to buy, careful of their needs as they've presented so far, keeping a mental pattern. He could really use something. Anything. He wonders where that pack of cigarettes he'd discarded had gone, but doesn't dare open the door to the truck, for fear of waking the sleeping prince with lips the colour of a poisoned apple.

When, Taeyong wonders, did Jaehyun become a prince?

His phone, having died in the night, does little to distract him from the urge to wake Jaehyun from his peace, if only for someone to talk to, something to do, someplace to go. Taeyong may have been accustomed to company who thought it more appropriate to ask him about bedfellows than why he was going west, but that didn’t mean he was too keen on going without. Eventually, curiosity and need win out, as well as the rising sound of traffic from the country highway they’d abandoned sometime in the night, in favour of a safe place to sleep.

“Hey,” Taeyong says when he opens the passenger door, careful of Jaehyun’s feet, that they don’t swing right out and leave him slipping from the bench seat. “Um, it’s morning.”

Jaehyun cracks one groggy eye, ears colouring so suddenly and strangely that Taeyong doesn’t think to ask questions about it, his resolve from the night before crumbling. “Time’s it?” he asks, and again the sassafras has left him, the only difference being that Taeyong’s convinced it’s left him, too, and that he’s strangely bereft without it.

“Dunno.” There’s an irritated edge to Taeyong even as he’s figuring out the best way to swing one leg, sit at the very corner of the seat Jaehyun’s legs currently occupy. “You don’t have a phone. We don’t have a charger.” He glances up at the sky, back turned to Jaehyun for a long moment. “It isn’t noon yet, I don’t think. You don’t know any wild survival tactics to figure out what time it is exactly, do you?” And yeah, it’s a joke, but the knowledge that Taeyong knows almost nothing comes back to him all at once.

“Nope,” says Jaehyun, mouth popping exquisitely around the ‘p’. Taeyong can see it without looking, without even periphery.

“Cool.” His leg starts shaking of its own accord, as if somehow in sleeping his body had stored up all the nervous energy his waking self might otherwise expel. He feels a shift behind him, and assumes Jaehyun is going to sit up.

“How much money d’we have after your tab?” Jaehyun, more awake now, inches closer, still conscious of the space between them and how it apparently should be left alone (Taeyong flinches at the memory, what little of it chooses to return to him). “D’you think we’ll be okay finding a cheap motel room in a city somewhere?”

“Somewhere where,” mumbles Taeyong, and now that the space directly behind him isn’t occupied he scoots back into the seat properly, belting himself in without thinking of it. 

“It’s a couple hours’ drive, but…” And now Jaehyun is sort of talking to himself. “Keep me up until we find someplace to get coffee. Tell me how much money we’ve got.”

Taeyong fishes the bills from his back pocket, counts them, rattles off the total. More than enough for a room, and not even at the worst place, but God knows where and when they’ll find someone dumb enough -- charitable enough, Taeyong corrects himself -- to rob the way they’d done last night.

Jaehyun, however, doesn't seem very offset by the number, low as it is, and nods his satisfaction, coaxing the engine of the truck to life and letting it run for a few minutes. "I'll be back'n a minute," he says, exiting the cab and leaving Taeyong to his own devices. 

Taeyong stares at his reflection in the glass of his dead, dead phone until Jaehyun returns, wondering how he manages to look so young when he feels old merely by virtue of exclusion, years' of not being let into someone-or-another's head aging him beyond his years. When Jaehyun returns, he demands with an angrily pointing finger, "Where are we _going_?

Jaehyun, though, just throws his head back and laughs. "Mississippi," he says when his gut's no longer rolling. "It really won't take s'long as you think it'll be." Taeyong bites back the grammatical correction threatening to trill right off his tongue, wishes he had something that took the defensiveness from his shoulders, from his mouth, the angry curve of his lips. "I do need coffee." For distraction Taeyong fixates on the sigh that is Jaehyun speaking about himself, the soft _ahh_ he uses to refer to his own person. It's all accent, and Taeyong should hate it, same way as he does the rest of the South, but he can't manage when Jaehyun's looking at him like that -- like he's something worth inspection, like he's worthy of all the things Taeyong's told himself he doesn't deserve.

He wonders who told him first, and if he'd be able to listen, should Jaehyun try to convince him otherwise.

They pull away from the patch of dirt that had been their campsite, and onto the pine mulch that marks differentiation between the woods and the road, Jaehyun slowly navigating the truck until they hit pavement, careful the entire time. There's something so steady about him. "You've been driving a long time," Taeyong comments, then winces, cradling his face in his palm. 

"I have," and there's something wary in Jaehyun's tone as he carefully edges the truck around a bend in the road. "Y'wanna ask me something about it?"

"When did you learn?" 

"Oh, 'bout 12 or 13." Jaehyun grins, so bright he seems to outshine the sun, and Taeyong thinks of renting the dimples so he'll have somewhere permanent to live, already committed to making Jaehyun smile like that at any and all times. "But I got my license at a normal age. Kicked ass at parallel parking. Flunked a couple times, 'cause they want _proper_ drivers and I learned all that pretty much after the fact."

"Parallel parking?" There's something off about it, but Taeyong can't put his finger to it completely, and frowns. "Huh." He skips a beat. "Are you going to tell me about how you knew those guys?"

"Just the one," Jaehyun corrects quickly. "Sicheng. We know each other from another life, I think. He's connected to one of my connections. I knew he lived out this way somewhere, but not where, 'zactly. I know his boyfriend -- " There's a significant pause around the word boyfriend, and Taeyong thinks all too late he should make sure Jaehyun's not rolling his eyes, "drinks like a fish whenever he's got the chance, and if Thursday night ain't a chance I dunno what is."

Taeyong snorts, not realising that most people need a chance to do anything. "Was it Thursday yesterday?"

"It was."

"How do you know?" He's starting to loathe how his curiosity gets the better of him, but it is what it is, he supposes with a roll of his own eyes. 

"I just do. That, and you're always on your phone when you aren't talkin' to me. I catch glimpses here and there."

"You aren't looking at the road?" A gentle panic rises in the base of his throat.

"I'm lookin’," Jaehyun clarifies. "Told you I learned _good_ driving after the fact."

"Why don't you have a phone?" Taeyong notes that Jaehyun hasn't actually answered the initial question, but tucks its repetition under his tongue for a little on down the way, maybe once Jaehyun's got a coffee and Taeyong's got a beer. 

"Don't need one out here. No one I know wants to call me for anything but money, and no one I don't know should be callin' me." Jaehyun says this very stiffly, like he's rehearsed it but not enough to make it flow naturally from him. Taeyong doesn't think he's lying, per se, but doesn't want to call him out in case it's true. "Why're you so obsessed with yours?"

"It's the only thing I have from Florida that reminds me I'm a human being." Taeyong thinks about this, deciding it's true long after it's out of his mouth. He has functional alcoholism and a dead mom, but those aren't Florida exclusive. He goes to say this, but then decides better of it, chapped bottom lip worried between his teeth. He could use some water, when Jaehyun figures it's time for that coffee he's railed on about. "Why are you always talking to me in a fake accent?"

"Ask again tomorrow," Jaehyun insists, slowing down at a gentle hairpin in the road ahead. "Really. You'n me're about to get to know each other real well once we cross state lines, so you can ask me again when that's the case." 

Taeyong narrows his eyes, then slumps against the doorframe, feeling the fingers of the wind thread through his hair, whispering 'there there' into his ear like that's any kind of comfort. He doesn't think he did much driving yesterday -- they'd mainly stayed in one state, after all -- but watching Jaehyun drive makes him tired of driving, of cars, of not having a bed in which to sleep. Really, he's trying to come up with another question he doesn't think will cross whatever invisible boundaries they're slowly coming to define. "Why'd you pick me up? Someone told me you were going to be where you were."

"Johnny didn't tell me to get you, f'that's what you're asking," Jaehyun says, and he's so fucking amiable, even when he's focused on not driving them clear off the road, that it almost makes Taeyong cycle back into hating him. Almost. "I made the decision on m’own. I'm near Dacula every Wednesday. Or I was. I didn't stop to tell him g'bye, didn't want you to think we had conspired against you behind your back."

Taeyong snorts. "I would've thought that."

"I knew that the moment I met you." Jaehyun laughs out his reply. "You wanna act like you're so hard t'read and like no one'll ever understand you but you're a lot simpler'n you think."

"S'that so?" Taeyong asks dryly, gently kicking Jaehyun's ankle. "I'll keep that in mind next time my phone works. It'll keep me warm while I listen to the Smiths and think about the sad state of the world, what with how it's looked down upon for me to wear eyeliner whenever I want."

Jaehyun almost runs them into a tree laughing, but manages to keep on the road at the last second.

///

Tupelo is, from all Taeyong can gather, an absolute neon shithole of a city. Not that he's opposed either to neon or to shitholes; he was born in one and raised under another. He doesn't really appreciate Tupelo for what it is: a modern oasis in the middle of a deep-Southern desert.

Jaehyun's still the brightest thing here. He looks at everything with the wonderment of a child, though he doesn't seem to mean to do that, explaining here and there about the furniture industry boom that had died down in the 90s, some battle fought during the Civil War, all the textile companies that keep people in business.

"Elvis Presley was born here," Taeyong says, some distant part of him left over from a time in which he had watched trivia game shows ad nauseum recalling the trivia. He then goes on to add, "Elvis Presley was a racist piece of shit who died on the toilet as karmic retribution."

Jaehyun snorts, but nudges him, careful to note the different stares Taeyong manages to draw even on this relatively uncrowded street. "What're you doing after this?"

"What, after exploring the middle of nowhere but in city form with you?" Taeyong craves the peace of mind that comes only from touching another human being, but remembers as he's absently reaching to grab Jaehyun's arm and hold tight to him the incidents from the morning, and the night before, figures it's better left undone. "I don't know, I guess I'm going wherever you're going."

"Y'know you're allowed to tap out whenever you want," and there's something so sincere, so heartfelt in Jaehyun's eyes that Taeyong can't seem to shake the feeling he's kicked a puppy somewhere along the way, between Dacula and here.

"Yeah, I know," Taeyong says with a quiet noise of disapproval. "I'm an adult. I've tapped before." He immediately regrets the phrasing on that particular declaration, but doesn't amend it regardless.

"Have you?" Jaehyun, in turn, doesn't leave space for that to get an answer, instead ducking into a diner round a corner. "I hope you're hungry. We're gonna eat a good meal, and get some good rest, and we'll be ready to tackle Louisiana tomorrow." He raises his eyebrows in something like significance as he holds open the door behind himself for Taeyong to follow along.

Taeyong, in turn, wonders if he can get a drink at a diner at some early time of day without an elderly waitress giving him a look of complete disdain. Eventually, however, he decides that it doesn't actually matter what an elderly waitress would think of him, and toddles along behind Jaehyun, the both of them approaching the booth so they might be seated.

It's strange, to see Jaehyun in such a good mood. Taeyong wants to ask about it, but they're immediately interrupted by a surprisingly middle-aged brunette who asks if they want cream and sugar with their coffee. The entire restaurant is decked out with photos of Elvis, newspaper articles about things he'd done, no mention of his death.

When their attending company is gone, Taeyong leans in on his elbows, flashing a wicked grin. "You think they all believe that Elvis is alive on some island somewhere?"

Jaehyun, too, leans in, poking a spoon into his cup of coffee, black with two sugars. "I think he is on some island, on another planet."

They share a nervous giggle, both glancing over opposite shoulders, afraid that something horrible will happen to their food if they get caught joking about this. "So, you're happy," Taeyong notes aloud, dipping a straw into his sweating glass of ice water. "Why're you so happy?"

"Oh, I dunno," and here Jaehyun rolls his eyes, something fond about his expression, "it might be because we're going to Louisiana tomorrow, and because I've got a friend I want you to meet, and because I like spending time with you." He's dropped all pretense of the accent since Taeyong had called him out on it; while Taeyong misses it, the warmth that would envelop him like a friend's embrace whenever Jaehyun spoke, it's comforting to hear traces of the north, in its own way. "Is that wrong? That I like hanging out?"

"Not really, no," Taeyong admits, sipping at his water, something like guilt in his wide eyes. "Would you say that even if I told you I didn't necessarily feel the same?" There's obvious dishonesty to it. He’s simply trying to figure out _why_ anyone would enjoy spending time with him and, more truthfully, whether or not he's accidentally caught Jaehyun in some sort of strange Stockholm syndrome, though he’s not entirely sure he’s the captor, and completely sure that if he is at least he didn’t mean to be.

Jaehyun doesn't seem to notice or care what the implications of Taeyong's question might be. "I would," he says with his entire chest, puffing out. "You're interesting. I don't usually pick up hitchhikers, but I think I might if they're all as interesting as you."

Taeyong doesn't know what to say to that, and has to admit that being caught off-guard is something that pleases him in a way he can't explain. The happiness mixes with an emotion he can't really figure out, something to do with Jaehyun picking up other hitchers; it tastes of battery acid at the back of his throat.

The waitress comes back and offers to take their orders. Jaehyun hasn't looked at the menu at all, but orders waffles with bacon for Taeyong, and country fried steak for himself. She doesn't even bother writing it down. Taeyong stares down the tip of his nose, deciding once and for all that all Jaehyun's secrets, whatever ones he still keeps, are hidden behind this mask of handsomeness because he's actually a mind-reading demon.

"You like sweets," Jaehyun says simply, when he catches Taeyong staring in that way he does, like he's working at a Rubik's cube that simply will not be solved. "But protein is important. We're gonna do a lot of walking today."

"Why walking?" Taeyong is grateful for the opportunity to move around, feels that he hasn't in days.

"I'm going to go get the truck worked on when I have a minute. When we're done eating." He cradles the mug of coffee in his hands, taking a couple sips of it.

The money in Taeyong's pocket screams at him its own inadequacy; he shifts to silence it, and with it the worry nagging at the dead center of himself. "Can we afford that?"

Jaehyun just smiles. "No, it's nothing like that," he says, reaching across the table and stopping just short of resting coffee-warm fingers that Taeyong itches to feel upon his skin. "I just know a little bit about fixing cars. I'll go find a mechanic, do some work, leave you to go find us a place to stay tonight and whatever else you want to do."

Taeyong suspects that he's already a burden on Jaehyun, even after two days, and bites his lip to keep from asking that question in particular. Funny how the only things he's figured out how to ask are the ones that don't matter. "I thought you were going to say that you knew somebody," he answers at last, sure he's at least as bitter as Jaehyun's coffee. "Everywhere we go, you know somebody."

"I don't know everyone in the world, Taeyong."

His heart stops, just for a moment. He doesn't know that he's ever heard Jaehyun say his name. This infuriating, unreadable man. Taeyong wants to reach across the table and take his face between ice-cold palms, if only because he wants to know what the reaction might be.

He trembles at the idea, stifles it by fitting both hands around his cold glass, which another waitress dips by to refill even as he clings to it, his only lifeline in an otherwise emotionally lost moment.

"I also figured you probably have a lot of questions you want to ask me after today. And that's fine. You can write them down." Jaehyun pauses. "There's a phone charger in the truck. No, don't look at me like that, I don't have a phone I'm secretly hiding from you, I just remembered I've got one. Wouldn't have worked in most of the places we've gone. Once you get us a room you can do whatever you want to do to feel like a human."

This is awful considerate, Taeyong wants to say, but he bites that back, too. "Where do you want to stay?"

"Wherever's cheapest _and_ not crawling in bugs or mice." The idea of Jaehyun being afraid of anything has never occurred to Taeyong before this very moment. "If you can ask around, or maybe look in a motel or two."

Their food arrives, and Taeyong is saved from overenthusiastic agreement by the fluffiest waffle he's ever seen in his life. His stomach rumbles and he remembers he hasn't had a proper meal in over a day. Though he might have resented Jaehyun for taking care of his order for him even a couple minutes ago, he's really grateful he didn't have to decide on his own. He knows himself, his hurricane desires all too well.

Some distant thought occurs to him: that someone close to him might get caught up in those desires. When he raises his head from cutting himself a bite of waffle, Jaehyun is just looking at him, that bright smile reaching all the way to his eyes, and Taeyong thinks about the moon constantly, but never in the context of the most beautiful eyes he's ever seen.

///

That night, after Taeyong's taken a walk around town, a shopping venture, nap, a shower, and another meal of snacks in that order, he wanders out into the cheap neon of the town, intent on figuring out where Jaehyun might be. It's a fucking curse that there's only one phone between them, but Taeyong clings to his like a lifeline, as if Jaehyun even knows his number or any of his contact information, as if he'll suddenly figure out how to get a message to him.

He keeps seeing flashes of that man everywhere he goes, and just might hate himself a little for it, though that hatred grows when he gets hopeful every time.

When he doesn't succeed on the first few tries -- most of the mechanic shops are closed, this late into the evening -- Taeyong ducks into a convenience store, buys himself cigarettes and a lighter, chainsmokes a couple outside the bounds of the store's front door. The concrete beneath his feet shimmers with the waves of heat, every day getting warmer, with him paying in sweat. He catches sight of the cherry of his own cigarette, and the glowing red of it set against the vaguely bright nightfall surrounding him brings him a comfort he can't truly describe.

In the end it's Jaehyun who finds him, though Taeyong's ingenuity helps out quite a bit: they meet up at the same diner where they'd taken their mid-afternoon breakfast, and Jaehyun's got a grease stain on his cheek, another brief series of them along his fingers and his forearms. Taeyong doesn't bother trying not to stare.

"Do you want to eat here again?" he asks, a little breathless, and it's stupid of him but Taeyong fixates on the way his chest heaves, suddenly reverting to a preteen he'd once been, obsessing over a crush. That realisation, while sudden, is not earth-shattering; it's easier to accept the truth than deny it.

"No, not at all." Taeyong sniffs his disdain, not that the waffles had displeased him so much as the idea that he could go to the same place twice. "I got a couple snacks." He doesn't add that he's had a little to drink, just enough to hold himself over in case they go out again tonight. "And I found a thrift store. Got myself something else to wear. Did you need something?"

"I need a shower," Jaehyun says, and that accent is back, seemingly unaware of it, the way it drips in, syrupy sweet, and normally Taeyong would long for it, same as he longs for Jaehyun to touch him as he had in that bar a whole state away, but now it unsettles him. He shoves it down as best he can. He swallows thickly. "You got the room, then?"

"Yeah, everything is good. You sure you don't want something else to wear? The place I went is open until late..." Taeyong stares at the ground in lieu of making a fool of himself staring at Jaehyun. "I mean. If you want. I don't want to force anything on you." It's not hard to omit the truth, that as gorgeous as Jaehyun looks as Taeyong's seen him thus far -- especially now, greased and dirty and smelling of work. "Did you get the truck taken care of?"

"Sure did." Jaehyun grins, and takes Taeyong by the elbow. "It'll be ready in the morning. Then we'll go to Louisiana and everything will be fine."

Taeyong holds onto the question, lets Jaehyun lead them both where they're going to go, occasionally piping up directions when he's sure they're going away from the hotel. "How long have you known how to fix cars?"

"Couple years." Jaehyun rounds a corner, nearly tromping on a planter full of daffodils that surely belong to the fine local authority folk of Tupelo. "A friend taught me. One you're going to meet hopefully in the next couple of days." He's practically vibrating with something that might be excitement, not that Taeyong wants to put feelings in Jaehyun's heart or words in his mouth.

"Do you need to call your friend we’re seeing next?" Taeyong asks, his own phone burning a hole in his pocket, itching to check out of the reality of the situation by checking his messages.

"Probably. I tried earlier but his phone is off."

"You just _know_ his number?" Round the next corner is the motel Taeyong had abandoned earlier in pursuit of material happiness and, more importantly, Jaehyun's company. Without even thinking he reaches for Jaehyun's hand, stopping him from stepping out into the street too quickly -- a good thing, judging by the sedan rounding the corner way too quickly to be safe for anyone involved. "Hey, be careful!" Taeyong shouts as the driver speeds away, flipping the bird out the back windshield. "Fuckin' asshole."

Jaehyun laughs. "S'that the place?" He nods up ahead of them, the vacancy sign flickering dangerously in a mostly empty parking lot the likes of which neither of them are currently helping. There are a couple people, strangers with dirty faces wearing ragged clothes, standing on the sidewalk bordering the lot on the side opposite the front entrance; they watch as Taeyong and Jaehyun linger in their hold too long, hands clasped together as they cross the street in relative safety.

These strangers do not look friendly.

Suddenly, it occurs to Taeyong that he really needs to get the fuck out of Mississippi.

They separate their touch by the time they reach the front doors, and they'd probably just march right inside but one of the sidewalk zombies stops Taeyong right before he crosses the threshold of entry. "Hey, you wouldn't happen to have a cigarette, would you?"

Without thought or hesitation, Taeyong reaches into his back pocket, flips open the cardboard top on the pack, flicks one out filter-first -- all in one smooth movement. He feels Jaehyun's eyes boring holes into the side of his face as he offers his lighter, only to be turned away, the man in his oversized cargo shorts and too-tight t-shirt proffering one of his own. "Thanks, man."

When they're inside, Jaehyun gives him a sort of sharp look. "You didn't have to do that," he points out.

"I did," Taeyong disagrees in his primmest voice. "Someday I'm going to be without, and need someone to share with me."

"Like how I shared my ride with you?" They make a slow path down the eastern hallway, door after door making their own various noise or lack thereof as the pair of them go by.

"Kinda, yeah," Taeyong agrees, fishing a tiny key out of his back pocket and using it to wrench open the door to their hotel room. "Hey, uh, I should've told you, but there's only a bed and a couch in here. Don't make that face, it was what we could afford, since I know we're going to need gas on the way to wherever we're going."

"Louisiana."

"Right, Louisiana." Taeyong grimaces. "And I was reserving some for food, and some for you to get something to wear -- you've been wearing the same clothes since _before I ever saw you,_ alright, it's a fair assumption, don’t make that face -- and whatever else we're gonna need."

"You mean your alcohol," Jaehyun murmurs, and it's strangely the lack of judgment that has Taeyong starting to boil, if only at the very edges. "It's fine. I get it. Easier for you to keep drinking than to start shaking while we're driving across state lines." There's something fierce about it, still not concerned with Taeyong's needs or motivations so much as some worry Jaehyun's yet to express.

The room is cool. It chills the rage building in Taeyong's chest. It helps quite a bit that Jaehyun turns away, and that Taeyong can do the same when he starts stripping out of his grease-coloured work tank.

"Go take a shower," Taeyong mutters, flopping onto the aforementioned couch and narrowly avoiding kicking a bag of snacks onto the motel room floor. "I'll be here."

"Hey."

Taeyong lifts his head, however briefly. "Hm?" He's playing the part of someone far too dramatic to admit that their waterline is stinging.

"I mean it. I'm not angry about it. We'll figure something else out. I can ask my friend for money, when we see him, if it's that important."

It is, Taeyong determines, extremely difficult to keep this conversation at the level of seriousness it needs to be when he's actively keeping himself from staring at the contours of Jaehyun's chest, dimly illuminated in bedside lamps and the slightly-parted blinds. Even more so when his neglected body doesn't seem to want to cooperate with his willful ignorance of the beauty just in front of him.

"I'll make it up to you. There's gambling where we're going? Pool?" Taeyong does his best to sound hopeful, though he's convinced his best isn't very good in the first place. When Jaehyun nods his assent, he continues. "Then whatever we need, I'll try to take care of."

With that Jaehyun disappears into the tiny bathroom, closing the door behind him.

Taeyong already plans on sleeping on the couch. His back still aches from last night. He digs in the bag of snacks, pulls out one of his tiny liquor bottles, drinks it down in one go. At least it's just a shot. At least he doesn't have to worry about drowning whatever feeling he's experiencing tonight.

When Jaehyun exits the bathroom, a towel slung around his waist to protect whatever illusion of modesty Taeyong's supposed to believe and dripping with remnant water, Taeyong swears he feels his heart stop. "You wanna do me a favour?" he asks, and his wet hair frames his face in such a way to accentuate the angles found there naturally, the way a cloudy sky might frame a picturesque mountaintop. "Go down to that thrift store. Get me...something." He rattles off numbers -- sizes, Taeyong realises slowly, alcohol starting to take hold. "I don't really care, just make it something I can move around in, you know we do a lot of moving. Driving."

"M'drunk," Taeyong half-lies, uncapping his second shot and pouring it down the back of his throat, nostrils flaring and colour rising to his cheeks.

"So you'll be fine," Jaehyun deadpans, turning on his heel to make his way back into the bathroom, presumably (at least, to Taeyong) to rearrange the dishevel of his hair. "Seriously."

Taeyong won’t admit it but he’s anxious to meet the loiterers again. His vices cost he and Jaehyun dearly, this being the first place in which they’ve paid to sleep; he’s in no hurry to spend more money on them.

Still, it isn’t like it’s in him to deny Jaehyun anything.

He rifles through the discarded pile of clothes Jaehyun had left on the bathroom floor, careful not to knock into him as he stares into his reflection in the mirror. There is something so impossibly haunted about Jaehyun; he wonders, however fleeting the thought, if their ghosts might know one another in some distant other world the likes of which the living never see.

Taeyong notes the sizes, and leaves the hotel, not bothering to promise if he'll be back.

It’s under the harsh fluorescence of the thrift store, his pockets a thousand tons lighter now he’s not carrying around cancer, that Taeyong realises something that had yet to occur to him. Their relationship, whatever it may be in this liminal space they've created for themselves, has a definitive time limit. The west has an end, an ocean it meets. Taeyong doesn't know what 'out west' had meant when Jaehyun had explained in that gruff way of his to Jungwoo. He certainly doesn't know where their stopping point is -- if Jaehyun plans to meet the Pacific coast when it rises up to meet him or stop someplace before.

There's a nausea that rises in his gut, unexplained by the drinking, completely different. Nothing overcomes him as he fingers a pale pink t-shirt that looks like it might be Jaehyun's size. A fantasy dances its beautiful way through his imagination, wearing something he'd bought to put Jaehyun's name to it, the pair of them curled around each other.

It's been two days, and Taeyong is not yet shattered by the idea, nor ready to share it, but he can see this sort of thing going on for a long, long time.

When he trudges back to the hotel in which they're staying, his purchases in hand, he does not encounter the faces of strangers again. They have dissipated, mist upon the wind, their queries and needs satisfied. The feeling of haunting returns to Taeyong once more.

The rustling of plastic is what greets Jaehyun, as Taeyong cannot. Jaehyun is lounging on the suite couch, arms draped over its back on either side. Taeyong thinks he must be grateful for the space in which to stretch out. Another, far filthier fantasy plays itself out on his imagination's projection screen, but they don't have the money to fulfil it, and the idea of that in itself niggles at Taeyong. He locates his bag of snacks first, finds the last shot he'd bought himself, thanking the convenience of airplane bottles as he downs Jack Daniels straight.

In truth, he is waiting for the burn of the liquor to cleanse him, and prays to a God in which he doesn't believe that he'll have some relief. Neither of these things occur. Jaehyun has not moved; it appears he's dozed off, though Taeyong doesn't internalise that until the tiniest of snores passes Jaehyun's beautiful lips.

This hotel, he decides before chucking his empty bottle into the miniature trash can, is cursed, tempting him with so many things the likes of which he cannot bring himself to take -- though he's sure if he asked permission they'd be granted him in a heartbeat.

The sound of the bottle clinking against plastic is enough to stir Jaehyun from his light sleep. He offers a smile and Taeyong deeply considers renting real estate in those dimples, a place in which his tongue could take up residence, however temporarily. "Hey, you made it back," he murmurs, and his mouth is mushy with the promise of sleep yet to come.

"Yeah, I made it." He has yet to deposit his findings, but does so now, planting the shopping back in Jaehyun's lap. "Did you think I wouldn't?"

"You said you were drunk," and fuck, is he teasing? Taeyong's bouncing on his toes, now, impetuousness filling the void inside him as alcohol so often does. "I figured either you'd come back or someone would give you a better offer on a ride than I have." The double entendre does not escape either of their notices, it seems; Jaehyun's grin, gleaming egregious, grows. "Did they?"

"No," is all Taeyong says, sitting on the couch. Jaehyun, bold as Taeyong's ever found him to be, lingers a moment, then takes back his arms, careful not to graze Taeyong's shoulders in passing. "There's only one bed, you know. I thought I was gonna sleep here, let you have the bed."

"Nah, I don't mind not having a mattress." Jaehyun shifts away a bit, giving Taeyong a once-over, checking for any injuries Taeyong himself might not have noticed. "Wouldn't be the first time."

"Why do you say that?"

"Save it for Louisiana," Jaehyun reminds him gently, but his smile's fallen a fraction. "Do you want to make a compromise?"

"Yeah, sure."

"We can both have the bed. No, don't, I'm not finished. We don't have to spoon or anything--" and here, a little bit of that fake Southern bullshit drips into Jaehyun's tone, both captivating and infuriating Taeyong in one fell swoop, "unless you say it's alright. But I know you're gonna kick yourself in th'ass if you let yourself be selfish again."

Taeyong wants to protest, to tell Jaehyun that he has no idea how selfish he can be tonight, but then decides against it, bottom lip jutting out. In a decision not at all fueled by fantasy of things he could never dream of taking, he agrees with a curt nod. "You tired?"

"Little bit," Jaehyun admits, sheepish, the tips of his ears dyed a pretty red. "Think I was gonna nap before you came back."

"We can go to bed," Taeyong suggests, voice so soft he's not entirely sure he's said much of anything at all, though it feels like the weight of an anvil is on his chest. He stands, shrugs out of his shirt, noting the way he can feel Jaehyun's gaze as it tiptoes along the length of his spine, pleased with how warm and nearly tangible it is, almost like it's made of the honey Jaehyun's been pretending to have this entire time. Then he toes out of his shoes, too, kicking them hard against the back of the hotel room door.

The laugh Jaehyun gives him is the nicest thing he's heard since the thing with his mom, but there's no way to say that.

When he crawls into bed, the lights are still on; he draws the heavy, sterile-smelling comforter around him, wonders how many nights it's seen like this. He closes his eyes, listens to the sound of two matching breaths drawn in the room, the gentle clicking of the lights turned off one by one. Underneath him the bed gives way to a second weight. Jaehyun's back is to his; both of them are half-bare, Taeyong content with the added sound of denim scritching against denim, though he wishes more than anything to peel back those layers.

"Can you hold me?" he asks the darkness, and immediately regrets how small, how pitiful he sounds. He knows all too well that people look at him like something fragile, that it's got something to do with the well of sadness in his eyes, infinite and unrelenting; far be it from him to play into that.

Still, when the heat of Jaehyun's arm fits around his middle, Taeyong can't help the little sigh that flutters out of him, wings on the wind.

///

When in the morning he wakes to flurrying dust motes that speak to the quality of their room, Taeyong groans, stretches, and finds that there is an exhausted body draped over his own. He gasps, afraid to have hit Jaehyun in the face however unintentionally, and wriggles away to inspect him for any potential injury.

"I'm so, so sorry," he whispers into the relative darkness of the room, combated by thin streams of golden light that flickered in with short bursts. He can taste the overcast of the day before he lays his own two eyes upon it, and the grey idea of it does not bode well for the long drive to come during the course of today.

Jaehyun, for his part, grumbles and reaches for Taeyong's frame, a request which Taeyong happily acquiesces, further apology for his violent crime. He sighs, content, as he curls in on himself to accommodate the span of Jaehyun's arms. "It's Louisiana day," he points out in a careful tone, attempting to gauge the degree to which he'd woken his bedmate.

"'S'Leezianna day," Jaehyun mumbles in agreement, lips barely moving and Taeyong able to feel each and every one against his nape, a shudder running a hasty path down the curve of his spine. It'd be stupid of him to say he isn't turned on by the intimacy of it, by the closeness of Jaehyun's body against his own and the tickle of breath where short hair might otherwise do the job, but he simply crosses his legs and tries his best to think neutral thoughts. Not that it works. Perhaps he's more touch-starved than he'd initially anticipated, his mind suggests to him, employing the voice of a probable meditation coach in an attempt to soothe him where his own efforts aren't working.

Jaehyun interrupts this train of thought, barely a sound that cuts through the swirl of Taeyong's restless ideas, his imagination rampant in cooking up things with which to hurt him. "Time's check-out?"

"Eleven," Taeyong reminds him, not sure if he'd remembered to say as much the day before. "It's..." He glances at an archaic alarm clock, its loud, red numbers blinking to him the hour of daylight, its unholiness making him flinch away. "It's right before eight."

"Sleep," Jaehyun implores, and there's something so small about him, so comforted and relaxed, that Taeyong gives in easily, settling in.

"Getting up in half an hour," Taeyong tells Jaehyun, who snores in answer.

That half-hour, it turns out, is torturous, Taeyong having to hold himself back from making this a horribly awkward situation by rocking against the body so perfectly curved into his. He wants to talk, he wants to touch, he wants a multitude of things, but denies himself every single one, doing the world's job of it as far as he's concerned.

The minutes tick by like entire days; Taeyong swears the overcast, the clouds blocking out the sun's rays, are the sun rising and setting, letting him know the futility of his exercise in self-control. It's only fitting, he thinks, that his death should be in the arms of someone he barely knows.

Eventually, though, the half-hour passes and Taeyong disentangles himself from Jaehyun's arms, careful not to smack into him again, wary of waking Jaehyun before it's time. "I'll be back," he says to no one, as his one companion is not awake to hear him, and he steps away into the bathroom, stripping as he goes.

He's never really hated himself naked, but after last night, after seeing Jaehyun walk around with only a towel for modesty, he wonders as he catches a glance of himself in the mirror how he could ever be enough.

Stupid, he tells himself, wincing away and running the shower as hot as it will go.

By the time he's out and dressed, a second fresh towel wrapped around his head to keep the remaining colour from leaking down his brow, Jaehyun's up, just sort of staring out the window. "Can you play me a song?" he asks, not looking at Taeyong. "On your phone, I mean. Did you get yourself a charger?"

"Borrowed one from the front desk," Taeyong says, tugging at the hem of his own shirt and crawling into the mess of covers they've made, careful not to drip in Jaehyun's direction. "What do you want to hear?"

"Something you like," says Jaehyun, absent, and just now Taeyong notices he's opened the blinds just a touch and is staring into the sterling silver of the day, flecked with buttery golden sunlight here and there when the light catches just so. "I don't mind much of anythin'." His accent, Taeyong notes, is flickering in and out, something softer, less a caricature than he'd been before.

Taeyong turns on something dark, bluesy and gothic to suit the mood brewing outside. "How long's it take to get to where we're going?"

"'Bout five hours, in good traffic," Jaehyun supplies, bobbing his head to the beat of the music. "This reminds me of somethin', but iunno what." It's funny, how he can't seem to turn it off even when he's been caught in the act of lying just enough times to make the untruth unnecessary.

"It does for me, too." Taeyong shifts closer, til their elbows are brushing.

"We can't sleep at my friend's," Jaehyun explains, seeming to be at a loss for words for the very first time. "He's got a couple kids, not enough room for us. We're gonna have to take the truck bed again."

"Fine by me," and Taeyong hates that it comes out just this side of sharp, flinches away from his own tone. "You can have the cab, the bed's better for my back."

There's something that shifts in the subtle expression on Jaehyun's face. He doesn't say anything for a long while, and then finally agrees, "F'that's what you want."

He is, as per usual, indecipherable. Taeyong has a headache, the sort that can't be cured by the hair of the dog, nor the solving of a puzzle the likes of which it seems only he himself wants to know. "We'll see," he says softly. "Are you hungry?"

"Nope." That mystery dissolves, a raincloud after a storm, and Jaehyun grins, something evil unspoken between them. "I ate the rest of your snacks."

"Dude, seriously?" And Taeyong's laughing in spite of himself, and the rumbling in his stomach telling him he needs to fill it up with something before a five hour drive, not that he will, not that he's any inclination to actually listen to his body whenever it tells him anything. "I wanted those Cheetos, they sounded really good..." His bottom lip sticks out and he reaches between them, very gently shoves Jaehyun by the shoulder, an echo of a couple nights ago, outside a bar in the middle of nowhere.

"I'll get you more," Jaehyun promises, "when we get to Louisiana. I'll have my friend get you some."

"Your friend has _kids_, I don't wanna starve a couple destitute children." The pout only grows, and Taeyong's indignation with it.

"S'not a problem, he owes me money."

"Is that what happened with the last friends of yours I met?" Taeyong asks, and regrets it immediately, because there's something so open and honest in Jaehyun's face that Taeyong only notices when it flickers away.

"Something like that," he replies in his smallest voice.

Taeyong is beginning to hate hurting Jaehyun's feelings, or getting too close to his pocket secrets, or whatever it is he does every time Jaehyun gets this way. So he changes the subject. "Does your friend know how to cook? I'm starting to think I liked Jungwoo the best."

"I like Jungwoo best, too," and now Jaehyun is climbing from bed. "C'mon, let's get an early start and a coffee."

This, at least, they can agree on.

///

The drive certainly doesn't _seem_ like five or six hours, especially when Jaehyun finally relents and lets on that his truck's stereo is Bluetooth accessible and lets Taeyong pick what they're listening to. They mostly listen to more of the same, what Taeyong had put on in the morning, blues and rock and things he'd picked up a little while before his mom's passing, things that made him feel as haunted as people seemed to think he was.

He explains as much to Jaehyun in passing, broken sentences that make no sense to anyone but himself. Jaehyun, in all his infinite mercy, just sort of nods along, listening, letting Taeyong say whatever he needs to say, and encouraging him to say nothing if that's where the conversation takes him. There are a lot of quick stretches of silence, runways on takeoffs, their wheels drawing in for their own protection.

Taeyong wants to erase the vulnerability he’d felt last night, but can’t, no matter how he tries. Worse yet, he wishes he could stop seeing it reflected back at him whenever Jaehyun gives him one of those longing glances he doesn’t seem to think Taeyong notices. It is bad enough, he thinks, that he should let someone see him so small, so tired, but the fact that it is who it is just makes him feel as if he’s being beaten over the head with it.

Eventually he falls into complete silence. Jaehyun lets him do that, too, kind and giving as he is, and Taeyong has to bite his tongue to keep from asking what the fuck _that_ is about.

Land, solid and green with plenty of trees, stretches into something else, something sticky and filled with bugs. They roll the windows up to keep themselves from catching certain death. Jaehyun blows the air conditioning fairly cool, til Taeyong’s chattering a little and can’t tell whether he needs a drink or a thicker shirt. He thinks back onto his thrift purchases the day before and wonders if somehow he’d have been able to predict feeling this ugly cold as it fit its fingers into the spaces between his ribs. 

Somewhere along the way, scenery blurring heavy along his tired irises, Taeyong falls asleep.

When he wakes up, they’re parking the truck in someone’s driveway. He makes a noise of distress, the entire rest of the drive -- and his precious, precious time in Jaehyun’s presence -- having escaped him entirely. “Hey,” Jaehyun says, and the honey’s back, just a little bit, not the over-sweetened treat Taeyong has come to think of, “we’re here.”

He lifts his head, and everything in him aches, begs for a reprieve. “Does your friend have something to drink?”

Jaehyun just sort of half-laughs, and pushes himself from the car, sliding against the leather of the bench seat. “I think you and my friend are gonna get along just fine.”

What is probably the most important thing to glean about the house isn’t the architecture, though it is impressive -- New Orleans had always fascinated him, and for more than just Bourbon Street -- but the fact that just over the fence, Taeyong can see the pointed tops of above-ground tombs. He, like any other fake deep individual, has spent hours poring over their photographs on Instagram. It’d be silly of him not to recognise them.

He’s thinking of his mom, though, ashes spread halfway across the country.

“Your friend lives next to a graveyard,” he points out as he joins Jaehyun in the slightly-spongy yard, like it’s somehow a pertinent observation. 

“My friend lives next to a graveyard,” Jaehyun agrees with the biggest, dumbest grin tugging at his mouth. Taeyong, for once, isn’t thinking about moving in, or what those perfect teeth might feel like clacking awkwardly against his own.

They don’t even technically get to the front porch, because they’re bum-rushed by two teenagers, one hopping up and down as he swings arms around Jaehyun’s shoulders and the other hanging back about a half-inch from the exact spot in which Jaehyun and Taeyong are standing. Jaehyun laughs, so big and broad that Taeyong is in envy of anyone or anything that can draw this sweeping a reaction from him. The other kid, the one with some clear reservations and a good couple inches on his companion, flashes Taeyong a look full of question marks.

“Hi,” he says shyly after a little bit of a staring match. “I’m Jeno.”

“Taeyong,” comes the answer before he can contemplate withholding it. “You two know Jaehyun?”

“Mark does,” Jeno says with a nod as Jaehyun and Mark exchange rapid-fire conversation that makes no sense to anyone outside themselves. “You’re gonna wanna come inside. The bugs’ll get you before the heat does, but neither one’s gonna be fun for you.” Jeno’s eyeing Taeyong up and down, and Taeyong knows all too well the feeling of sizing someone up. “Doyoung’ll want to meet you, anyway, after he gets done wringing Jaehyun’s neck for everything.”

“Everything,” Taeyong echoes, nodding along as he follows behind the two-headed amalgam that Mark and Jaehyun have become.

“How long’ve you been driving?” Mark is asking as he pushes open the front door of the house which, in all honesty, looks a bit like a gothic cathedral inside.

“Oh, couple days,” and Jaehyun’s response is back to the fake sweetness, molasses that drips slow down Taeyong’s spine. It’s cartoonish, and it draws a giggle from Mark the likes of which Taeyong’s only heard from small children and slightly bigger dolphins. “I picked up Taeyong in Georgia. Near Woo’s place.”

“Oh, so he’s met Jungwoo!” Mark is really enthusiastic about this, whips around on his heel to fix his bright gaze on Taeyong, who’s shorter than Jeno but somehow hiding him from Mark’s line of sight anyway. “Did you like him? Was he alright?”

“He seemed...happy,” Taeyong intones, slow, thinking over the words, “until he didn’t.” He trips over the edge of a jet-black runner threaded through with rivulets of red. When it very briefly rises up to meet him, he admires the artistry of it, if not the darkness it adds to an already dark hallway.

Jaehyun saves Taeyong from further interrogation. “Jeno, where’s Doyoung got off to?”

“Oh, he’s at work, but he took off early when Kun called and let him know you’d made Jungwoo’s delivery,” and Jeno’s got this rumble to him, this gruffness that doesn’t befit the kindness settling around his eyes. Taeyong is fascinated, having thought himself the only true dichotomy of a human being he’d ever encounter, especially on this trip.

“I thought you said your friend had kids,” he asks by way of not asking.

“You’re looking at them,” Jaehyun says with a shit-eating grin.

“These are not kids.”

“We aren’t kids,” Mark agrees, decidedly solemn. “We’re actually not that much younger than Jaehyun, not that it matters much to Doyoung, he’s so old and grumpy in his soul that he thinks everyone is a kid.” There’s a beat skipped in there somewhere, but Mark speaks so quickly that Taeyong barely has time to catch up. “He might think you’re a kid, too, if you let him.”

“I’m a kid,” Taeyong says fondly, allowing Mark to sidle past him, down the hall and into some other room. “Is there something to drink?” he asks, first Jeno, who lives here, then Jaehyun, who’s got some connection at least.

Jaehyun doesn’t falter for a second. “You wanna have some more of Woo’s stuff?”

“Well, yeah,” snorts Taeyong, “but Jungwoo’s all the way back in Georgia.”

“Don’t be dumb,” Mark calls from the kitchen, “we collect Woo’s stuff whenever we can. Whenever he lets us! I haven’t had any, but Jeno…” He pauses, collects himself, has it in him to look a little guilty about outing Jeno. “Jaehyun, don’t tell Doyoung.”

Jeno, too, is pushing past his elders, disgruntled, and Taeyong has to wonder whether or not that look on his face, that fond exasperation, means anything in the context of his own relationship. It takes a minute of peering into a den that’s lined with candles on every imaginable surface, most of them dripping with signs of long-term use and a couple burned down to nubs that can no longer be used, for Taeyong to realise that projecting other relationships onto his own is particularly unhealthy. Especially when he takes into consideration that he and Jaehyun have barely had a real conversation about...whatever this is.

He really, really needs a drink.

Eventually Mark and Jeno return, Jeno grumbling good-naturedly and guiding Mark toward the sitting room with a hand on his shoulder. “Shouldn’t tell you any more secrets,” he says, and he’s so soft about it that Taeyong almost forgets the angst that's been plaguing him for the majority of the day.

Someone -- Mark, he thinks, though he's a little too tired to make much distinction between the pair of them at the moment -- presses a drink into Taeyong's hands. It smells of peaches. Taeyong thinks of Georgia, of the friend he almost made and the beginning he'd given to himself entirely by accident.

He offers the drink back, even though his stomach lurches to see the glass leave his palm. "I want to meet Jaehyun's friend first," he says confidently.

It's difficult, pretending not to notice the surprise and satisfaction playing across Jaehyun's unreadable features, but he manages it.

Jaehyun takes the drink in Taeyong's stead, downs it in one gulp, pretty nose pinched between his thumb and index finger, though judging by the sound of distress he makes he doesn't do a very good job of staving off the burn. Moonshine'll do that to you, thinks Taeyong, the corner of his mouth curling in a lazy grin.

The kids wander upstairs, probably to a shared bedroom, and tell Jaehyun that "Doyoung will be home any minute now" in increasingly distant voices. Their retreat is marked with a light silence the likes of which Taeyong has gotten used to. They're posted up in the sitting room, surrounded by pentagrams and photographs of people who couldn't possibly be kin to someone named Doyoung, dust seeming to catch in the wrinkles of their skin despite their glossy finish. At least the guy has something like an aesthetic. A theme. It's not difficult to imagine someone raising kids here; despite the doom and gloom the entire place feels like someone's home, albeit in a completely different way than Jungwoo's had.

"They're cute," Taeyong comments, like someone talking about the rain starting to fall and not the children of someone's very best friend.

"They're annoying," Jaehyun contradicts, but there's no hiding the fondness. "You have any questions yet?"

Taeyong hums, shakes his head, then lights up, an idea flashing over his head. "Can I have some water? A snack? That was a long drive, I feel like we barely stopped..."

"Just the once," Jaehyun agrees with a curt nod. "Couldn't take it anymore." He disappears into the same kitchen that'd claimed Mark and Jeno a little while back. When he returns he's clutching individual bags of snack crackers, chips, a bottle of water dripping with condensation. "I didn't know what you'd want. Doyoung doesn't have a lot of sweets, it looks like...I know you'd like them better."

There's something so careful in the way their fingertips brush, like they've never touched even once in the time they've been together thus far. Hard to imagine it's been three days. Harder still to imagine that they're giving one another those looks but still managing, somehow, to be shy about it.

Taeyong eats in quiet, the only sound interrupting their shared silence that of his munching. At one point he plucks his phone from his back pocket.

He swears he hears something moving outside, but then that's probably the spooks he gets from being this close to cemeteries without having any business to do in them.

Eventually that swearing becomes something real, tangible, a headlight flooding in from between slightly-parted curtains. The rain has started pitter-pattering on a tin roof over the porch, probably something done by hand. Taeyong wonders if he could figure out how to fix it, if there's anything broken. That reverie is intruded upon by the sound of someone entering the house and, more importantly, Jaehyun sweeping dramatically from the wingback chair in which he'd been sitting in order to greet the new arrival.

There'd been, just for a second, something solid and strong-backed about the way Jaehyun had risen -- like he knew what he had to do, but wasn't happy about it. It fades quickly as Jaehyun rounds the corner. Taeyong decides that not-alone is better than alone when a cloven-hoofed devil is staring down at him with something close to warm judgment, and joins the party in the empty hallway, ears met with happy giggles the likes of which he isn't sure he's ever heard before.

Doyoung is slight, beautiful in a way that makes Taeyong think of ghost stories, but he clutches at Jaehyun's back like he's never letting go. His fingertips dig in little shallows even through the thick fabric of a screenprinted cotton tee, and he's griping the entire time, but Taeyong can see over Jaehyun's shoulder just how brightly he smiles. "You big lugnut," Doyoung is saying, and Taeyong's heart moves without his accord at the sound of the Northeast in Doyoung's voice, so different from the slow-moving symphony that is Jaehyun's clearly phony accent.

"Hey, I made it, didn't I?" asks Jaehyun, pulling back to gently punch his friend on the shoulder.

Taeyong can't help the throat-clearing, blames it on the salt he’d just ingested, but the moment is over anyway, and the both of them turn to fix their attention on him completely. "Sicheng said you'd be bringing a friend," intones Doyoung with all the fondness a fucking shrew of a human being can afford. Taeyong, after all, hates three things: being sober, being talked about like he isn't in the room, and being caught in a situation where he doesn't know the rules.

Jaehyun must sense this, smooths it over as best he can. "Taeyong, this is Doyoung, my very best friend in the entire world, my partner in crime, the only person who could've possibly bailed me out in Connecticut, and the platonic love of my life." Taeyong's face must be something stony, because there's this quaver in Jaehyun's voice at the end of his little spiel. "Doyoung, this is Taeyong. I picked him up in Dacula, and we've been thick as thieves ever since."

"Not literal thieves," clarifies Taeyong.

He doesn't know what's funny, but Doyoung and Jaehyun are clutching their guts with laughter.

"How much has he told you?" Doyoung must be better at reading people than he looks, because he too knows better than to not ease into this thing with Taeyong, judging by the sudden softness around his eyes, in spite of the enormous grin he's wearing.

"Not enough, I guess," Taeyong replies, shrugging, all too aware of how much of his collarbone is exposed when Jaehyun's eyes gleam in the semi-darkness of the hallway. "Can I have a drink, now?"

"Did the kids not offer you anything?" Doyoung looks horrified; seems he's got enough of the south in him to know hospitality, at the very least. He marches to the foot of the stairs, hollers up into the empty, echoing darkness, "_My sons better get down here right now before I make them wash my car again!_"

It takes a minute, but Mark comes down first, looking a little guilty and a lot disheveled. Dumb. Taeyong hadn't guessed their intentions when they had snuck away, but then again, Taeyong doesn't pretend as if he knows what anyone's intentions are anymore. Jeno comes a couple moments later, in similar unkempt fashion, a shining purple bruise standing out just behind his ear.

"Did you not show our guests around the house?" Doyoung asks, with all the patience saints preach about distinctly lacking in his tone.

"I got Taeyong a drink, he didn't want it," mumbles Mark, glancing away, guilt in the way he gnaws at his already swollen bottom lip. "I was nice, I promise. Can I please wash your car?"

"I didn't buy the hearse yet." Doyoung's not as short as he could be, instead focusing his attention. Funny, Jeno must be adopted, and Doyoung certainly isn't a father, but they look alike in the way that people who spend a lot of time together tend to do after awhile. Taeyong glances between them, sure he's made the right assumption. "I'm not _going_ to buy the hearse if you guys just go upstairs and make out while we have company over."

"We didn't plan on making out," says Jeno, amusement wrapping itself around the sentence.

Doyoung just rolls his eyes, dragging through the house, drama following him, an atmosphere just as much as an attitude. Everything about him screams _normal man who happens to be living in the most Goth piece of the south_, but that just intrigues Taeyong further. He toddles along, and Jaehyun, Mark, and Jeno linger where they're at, on the bottom landing of the staircase.

In the kitchen, Doyoung is pouring a different spirit, something dark. Taeyong clears his throat softly. "I'd actually like some of Jungwoo's stuff, if I can have it," he says in his most polite voice, remembering all too well the levels of Southern hospitality that had gotten him into this mess in the first place and wondering why, exactly, Jaehyun had bothered to pick him up if he wasn’t going to play by the rules of the game.

"This is for me," Doyoung deadpans, but when he turns around he's twinkling with something that makes Taeyong wonder what his childhood was like. "You like that moonshine stuff? I mostly just sell it to the local bars and whatnot."

"It's good, and it's horrible for me," Taeyong says, folding his arms over his chest.

"Yeah? S'that why you're here?" Doyoung winces at the sharpness of his own tone. "Sorry, I didn't mean it like that. Just...I tend to get suspicious of people who hang around Jaehyun for too long."

"You don't hang around him for long?" asks Taeyong, stifling a laugh behind slotted fingers. "It's okay. You can just ask. I don't know that I'll have an answer for you." He thinks a minute to what Jaehyun had told him before they'd made the journey to where they are now. "He said something like, it'd be easier for me to ask him questions after I'd met you."

Doyoung lifts an indifferent shoulder, already setting to fixing Taeyong his own drink, clear on clear. Taeyong unfolds his arms, watches the practised ease with which Doyoung seems to live his life, fascinated. "Ice? No? A man with taste. I believe he'd say that to you, because I believe he'd say that to anyone, but he doesn't bring just anyone to come visit me, you know?" He offers the glass, half-full and reeking, the scent of stonefruit just barely enough to cover the gut-rotting treatment Taeyong's sure to down in a couple gulps. He had missed it, but is only just coming to notice how much. "Especially not now that I've got those damn kids upstairs."

There's so much long-suffering in Doyoung. He bears it well, for all his complaining -- shoulders straight, head held high, a certain softness round his eyes that doesn't account for him having a house and two kids and maybe a hearse in the near future. Taeyong doesn't know what to make of him, and supposes as he takes that first inflammatory sip that it doesn't matter so much what he thinks of Doyoung as it matters the other way around.

"They seem to love you a lot," Taeyong points out, once his glass is half-drained.

"They do. I love them a lot. They're just a headache, once in awhile." Doyoung nods to the glass. "Are you going to want more? Just say the word. My house is your house, just not for sleeping."

"He mentioned." Taeyong's back muscles spasm at the memory of the truck in all its incarnations. "It's fine. I know what it's like not to have a lot of room." It's stupid how well he gets along with all of Jaehyun's friends -- Sicheng aside, he thinks, chalking that up to the hustle or whatever conversation Jaehyun'd had with them -- even if he can't bring himself to talk about a single real thing with Jaehyun. "I don't think I'm going to drink any more than this," he says after a moment's debate. "I'm trying to cut down on those things that are horrible for me, you know?"

"Do you smoke?"

"Sometimes. Not so much now that Jaehyun says it's not allowed in his truck."

Doyoung snorts into his second glass of what Taeyong assumes to be rum. "That thing reeked when we found it, and the entire floor was made of butts and burns and things like that. Don't let him boss you around." He abandons his drink, sways gracefully back through the kitchen, and Taeyong follows close behind.

They march right out the front door. Jaehyun's there already, posted up in a rocking chair and letting it move beneath him as it will, eyes closed, something ethereal to him. "What've you been telling this boy?"

"Nothing he hasn't been asking me," answers Jaehyun in something tired and barely above a whisper. "Really, don't look at me like that, I know what it sounds like but we don't have conversations that don't start with questions."

"You told him not to _smoke_ in your _truck_, after we found it like we did?"

Jaehyun makes a sound of practised nonchalance. "Took us a long time to get it running again. And anyway it didn't seem right to shit on Johnny's work like that, you know?"

Doyoung gets suspiciously quiet at the mention of Johnny, takes a seat in another rocker. He flashes Taeyong an apologetic glance. "There're only two chairs. You want me to move? You want _Jaehyun_ to move?"

Jaehyun pats his knee, not in the way to which Taeyong's been accustomed -- accompanied by jokes about _long rides_ and _seat's open_, courtesy of the various truckers he'd managed not to be murdered by between southern Florida and where he and Jaehyun had met -- but a simple open invitation, in case Taeyong should tire of standing. For the record, he doesn't think he will, legs still cramped from the long drive, the lack of breaks. Jaehyun drives like a maniac, and Taeyong can't wait for his turn, already plotting as many truck stops as he sees along the way in retribution for holding himself down so long.

"Wait, Johnny?" he asks, snapping to and soft surprise encasing him, a warm embrace the likes of which he didn't invite. "Bartender around Dacula Johnny?"

"The one and only," Doyoung agrees, voice soft and, perhaps, a bit regretful.

“Don’t sound so in love there,” Jaehyun tells Doyoung with a gentle nudge to the knee. “People might think you didn’t leave him for kids and a graveyard.”

“I didn’t leave him for kids and a graveyard,” Doyoung points out, bottom lip jutting out.

Taeyong, for the record, has no idea what’s happening, but he figures if there’s any time to ask questions it’s with Doyoung right there in front of him, instead of when he’s out of earshot. “You two seem to know a lot of people,” he says after fidgeting a long while, longer than it’s ever taken him to come up with the right words for something.

“Oh, we all used to know each other, once upon a time,” Doyoung says with an almost careless wave of his hand. “We lived up toward Maine. Ran a gang. Yes, a gang, don’t look at me like that.” He jerks that same hand Jaehyun’s direction. “He was our getaway driver. We pulled a heist that everyone called us crazy for and now we live out our days on laundered money that sits in a bank account we all used to share. Jaehyun’s been delivering people their dividends all along the South for the past...what is it, year and a half now?”

Jaehyun grunts his agreement as he gazes off into the silver of what’s left of the day, and everything makes sense all of a sudden. Sicheng in the bar. Jungwoo’s reluctance to let Jaehyun go anywhere. The fact that there’d been a delivery with no person there at all. “Who was that, the one at the greenhouse?”

“Kun,” Jaehyun answered shortly. “We don’t talk much. We didn’t back when we ran together.”

“Who’s out west?” Taeyong goes further, his hands starting to shake where they rest against his thighs.

“Taeil and Yuta, probably.” Doyoung laughs. “I think you saw Yuta for a minute while you were in Alabama, f’you saw Sicheng, I mean. Those two are always working to do something secret. Can’t leave the life behind, or something like that.”

There’s red lining the clouds that hang low and heavy in the sky. “How much of what I know about you is bullshit?”

“I didn’t lie,” Jaehyun says softly. “Except my name. And the accent, of course. People notice already that I stick out, all the way down here. Hard to hide when you’re surrounded by rednecks with lots of guns.”

“Your _name_?” Taeyong’s refraining from spitting, but it’s by a paper-thin margin.

“Yoonoh,” he says, lifting his head at long last. “Yoonoh Jung. I changed it when I was younger, but now that I’m down here I go by the old one instead.”

Taeyong barely hears him, is trying to process this new information.

Doyoung takes pity, stands up, stretches out his legs, apparently of a mind to leave them to their own devices. “Do you need another drink? Do you have enough cigarettes? There’s a little place around the corner that’ll get you anything you need. I could run out for you.”

Taeyong, wracked with guilt over just being here, let alone getting answers to questions he never knew needed asking, shakes his head. “We’re out of money. Supposedly that’s part of why we’re here.”

“Oh, yeah, definitely,” and Doyoung chuckles, but it’s something nervous, a bark of a laugh. “We’ll go do the paperwork tomorrow, alright? All the banks are already closed.”

“You sure you want to do all that?” Jaehyun’s eyes are soft, worried for his friend. “With the kids and all?”

“Oh, don’t worry about the kids. I’m smart enough to do all this shit with them as runners. _You’re_ the one who decided to do all the driving yourself.” Doyoung’s still laughing when he retreats into the house, but before the door closes behind him he adds, “Don’t worry about paying for what you need. You’re a guest, and you didn’t know what that meant before you got here.”

Taeyong’s still shrugging out tension when the screen door bangs against its frame.

“I like you,” he says without bothering to look at Jaehyun. “I tell you things. I let you sleep next to me in hotel beds. I like you, Yoonoh, enough to show you that I can hustle at pool and tell you that my mom is dead and remind you that I haven’t had sex with anyone dumb enough to give me a ride between where I was when she died and where you picked me up.” There’s something welling up in him, acidic and sharp, but he swallows it down like the liquor he drinks. “You know I drink to live and live to drink, and you know that I’m afraid of the dark -- no, don’t say anything, I’m talking now -- and that I don’t like to ask questions. You know more about me than any living person does. So why am I having to go halfway across the country to know the first thing about you?”

Jaehyun gestures that Taeyong might sit down in the rocker across from his own, but Taeyong shakes his head so briskly he feels the beginnings of a migraine coming on. “I can’t tell everyone what my thing is,” Jaehyun begins, so quiet Taeyong can barely hear him over the gentle drizzle on the porch’s tin roof. “Obviously. For one, it’s illegal. For another it’s a question of trusting someone enough to let them know _anything_ isn’t real. You’re lucky, you caught me faking and called me out and I had to listen.”

“Why did you have me pay for gas back in Dacula?” Taeyong can’t even think of a starting point, but he also can’t really consider listening to more of whatever this is. Not quite bullshit; he believes Jaehyun, though everything in his mind is indicating to him he shouldn’t. Just...things he doesn’t want to hear.

“Because I needed to pay out to Woo when I saw him. I have money on that card I showed you at all times, just...it isn’t always mine, and I needed to leave it alone for transfer reasons. And besides, you wouldn’t have come with me if you didn’t think you could contribute something. Johnny figured that out when he was spending time with you at the bar.”

“What happens when the money runs out?”

“We get normal jobs, live like normal people.” Jaehyun snorts, gesturing like he’s going to start counting on his fingers. “Everyone else is already kind of doing that except me. Doyoung is studying to be a mortician; all his monthlies go to his student loans and the bills. Woo has his moonshining, and family money to fall back on. Sicheng probably does a bunch of illegal stuff still, but I think he works on a farm out past where the mountains end. Something like that. Johnny’s got the bar, and his mom to worry about…”

“Stop. I know enough.” Taeyong drags his tongue across his parched lips, mystified and regretting not taking up Doyoung on that second drink, even if he needs his head right about now. "How much of this would get me into trouble?"

"I honestly don't know." Jaehyun stands up, crosses the brief space between the two of them, and reaches out to touch only to stop short. "Maybe just seeing me is enough for the law to want to talk to you, but...I don't think it matters."

"Why do you think that?" Taeyong's voice rises an octave, hysteria creeping in, making the shakes worse, making him think he _needs_ the liquor in order to process any of this. "This matters more than you know, Jaehyun." He laughs, a too-high sound, the force of it jarring even to his own ears. "Should I even call you that anymore?"

"Call me whatever you want." Jaehyun's too even, and Taeyong supposes that's the difference between the two of them: where Taeyong panics, thinks something monumental has changed, Jaehyun sees nothing at all. "It doesn't matter to me." He blinks once, twice. "Are you angry with me?"

Taeyong laughs again, sharper this time. "I'm not angry with you, Jaehyun, I'm angry that I feel like I've been played this entire time, and that you waited until I got halfway across the country before you thought it was okay to tell me that."

"It was for safety," Jaehyun says with a shrug. "I'll sleep in the bed tonight. You can have the cab."

"It's fucking raining, are you serious?" It comes out before Taeyong has a chance to stop it, and he takes in everything: the way Jaehyun leans into him, the intensity of his eyes, the chisel of his jaw and the subtle clenching and unclenching of his fists. "I'm not letting you sleep in the rain." _I'm not going to sleep anywhere without you._

That, at least, is something.

Over their heads, the rain comes down harder, making it sound as if the roof is going to collapse. Taeyong almost wants it to, because here, standing in front of Jaehyun, backed against a porch railing and with nowhere to go, he has never felt so small.

The screen door swings open, rattling in its frame. Jeno is there, poking his head out into the frey. "Hey, Doyoung said we're going to have dinner soon, if either of you degenerates wants to help." He cracks a smile, oblivious, and Taeyong shudders with laughter as all the tension floods from his body at once.

"Let's go inside," he tells Jaehyun, "we have a lot of time to talk about this stuff when we leave the state."

///

That night, Taeyong goes to a bar around the corner from Doyoung's house. He carries a stolen umbrella he'd found in a stand at the far reaches of the porch, practically on the soggy ground. Jaehyun doesn't follow. Taeyong doesn't know where he's going at first, but follows the sounds of music, the gentle clacking of pool.

He doesn't come back until he's worked up a couple hundred dollars. Even if Doyoung’s footing the bill for the rest of the trip, or however the fuck this works, he wants to help, wants to get away if he feels the need.

When last call doesn't come, Taeyong buys himself a couple drinks. Not enough to get stupid, but enough that he starts talking to strangers, asking them for rides. He doesn't see himself, but later, when he wakes up sober and head throbbing he wonders just how pathetic people thought him to be.

Eventually it's time to go home, the crowds thinning and the pickings getting slim. He trudges back, mud in his shoes and graveyard dirt under his nails. He's tired to the bone, more tired than he'd been the night prior in Tupelo, more tired than he's been since before his mom's memorial. The house is quiet, unlit, none of the happy noise that had occupied it before giving it any sign of life. It’s in this moment the place seems fit to sit next to a graveyard, all imposing and illuminated only by the dim, distant glow of a street lamp. The truck is all shut up, Jaehyun suddenly conscious of the rain in a way he clearly hadn’t been before. Taeyong circles it a couple times, peering into the window.

Jaehyun isn’t there.

The snores pour in like rainwater off a drainage ditch, and Taeyong realises he’s taken the bed after all. He goes round back and realises that the lining is covered in blankets and pillows, probably borrowed from Doyoung’s stock -- no way someone like that doesn’t have a stocked-full linen closet and not enough shame to protect his things from his best friend -- and, most importantly, Jaehyun, curled up small. Over his head is a canopy cover, one of those things used for tailgates and things of that nature. At least he’s safe, thinks Taeyong, heart aching and head spinning. At least he’s taken care of, even out here.

Later, he will have to thank Doyoung for everything he’s done.

Taeyong doesn’t have an explanation for why he’d left, not one that also warrants the kindness inherent in this gesture Jaehyun’s made for him. His mind had echoed with that reminder -- that he’s not contributing if he’s not making money, and he’s not made anything in a couple days -- 

He climbs in the lowered tailgate, losing his shoes somewhere along the way. “Hey,” he says softly, and Jaehyun startles from his sleep, eyes wide, frightened. Overhead the stars seem to watch, albeit dimly. Taeyong peeks out from beneath their cover and regards them first, wanting to give Jaehyun a moment alone with his fear. “Where’d you go?” Jaehyun finally asks, stone-cold suspicious, tongue heavy with grogginess.

“Went and made some money.” Taeyong shrugs, curling up, arms drawn around himself, small, and smaller with each passing second. “Had a couple drinks. I don’t want to make a bad impression on your friend.” That isn’t entirely true; he’s too self-conscious to think he’s been anything but a shit where Doyoung is concerned, even though he’d helped prep dinner and made jokes with Mark and Jeno throughout. “He doesn’t hate me yet. But maybe he would’ve.”

Jaehyun barks a laugh, and takes Taeyong into his arms without even stopping to consider it, that hesitation that’s so clear in every other interaction they have conspicuous in its absence. “If he didn’t like you he would’ve kicked you the fuck out.”

Out of where? “It isn’t like we’re in the house.”

“Doyoung’s kicked enough people out of my life.” Jaehyun’s breath is warm, tickling the crook of Taeyong’s neck, his earlobe; he squeezes Taeyong’s slight frame so tightly he almost forgets to breathe through it. “His own, too. You think happy, well-adjusted people start a gang and rob banks and shit?”

Taeyong doesn’t have an answer for that.

“You scared me,” Jaehyun says into the darkness, and it’s such a strong echo of the night before that Taeyong swears he feels his neck crack with the whiplash. “I thought you were going to ask someone else to take you somewhere.”

“I did,” Taeyong admits, “but no one could even give me the time of day.” He pauses. “It’s probably for the best. Eventually I’m going to get killed, doing stuff like hitchhiking.”

“Lucky for you I’m not a murderer,” Jaehyun says with a soft huff of a laugh.

Taeyong watches the dull glitter of the stars in his periphery, the way they spin in his slightly-drunken stare. “Lucky for me,” he says, not sure what he feels, or if he even feels anything at all.

But then Jaehyun’s arms circle tighter around him, and his heart flutters, and maybe it’s not about contribution after all. Not anymore. It’s with this in mind, and with a mouth that stings astringent with whiskey, that Taeyong lets sleep take him.

///

East Texas is nothing but trees.

This thought occurs to Taeyong far too late for him to protest, but the mere thought of the colour green starts to nauseate him. That, or the fact that he broke his promise to himself, made a bad impression.

Jaehyun’s been quiet most of the day. He and Doyoung had gone and done whatever official business they’d needed to attend early in the morning; Taeyong had woken up late, head reeling, still just a little tipsy from the late night he’d spent at the bar. The money hung heavy in his pocket for most of the day.

“Where are we going again?” Taeyong asks, for the fiftieth time, fingertips digging into the steering wheel just to hear the taut creak the leather makes beneath his hands. 

“Austin,” Jaehyun says. “It’s the closest city I can stand in Texas. Except maybe San Antonio.” He takes a second, licks his lips. “Are you going to talk to me about something that matters?”

“Do you want me to?” Taeyong checks the mirrors, afraid to fall asleep. He doesn’t have the raging headache he did by the time Jaehyun and Doyoung returned to the house, but he might as well for all the focus he has, all the alertness he can manage to have on the road.

“I think it’s better than you looking like you want to wreck this car and put yourself out of your misery,” Jaehyun quips, and Taeyong pretends not to notice the sly grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Why do you want to stay with me?”

Taeyong frowns, always a contrast, even when they’re in perfect sync. “What do you mean by that?” 

“You could’ve hopped off this ride at any time.” Oh, wonderful, they’re back to flirting. Taeyong fights the urge to pull over and ride in the truck bed the rest of the way to Austin. “You didn’t. You’re still here.”

“You don’t want me to answer that question right now,” Taeyong says softly, “I’ll definitely wreck the truck to put us both out of our misery.”

“Okay. Fair.” Jaehyun hums out a note, and there’s something so honey-buttered about his voice that makes Taeyong want to live in it. He’s got a lot going on in terms of where he wants to live, now he thinks of it. Probably a side effect of being essentially homeless, living out of motels and well-loved houses with a stranger. “You want to know things. I can see it.”

“I hate that you can read me. It’s been...what, four days? Five?” It’s a truth he can’t deny; though he cherishes every moment, and they’re what rocks him to sleep when Jaehyun rolls away at long last, everything is starting to blend together, become liminal again. All that time trying to outrun the feeling, and yet he can’t seem to do it, not entirely. “It doesn’t matter. You don’t know me.”

“I’m trying.”

The car is quiet save the hum of the engine. Up ahead, Taeyong sees illusions of water on the tarmac, and wonders how hard he’d have to believe in them to drown himself in one. “I know.”

“It’s not the torture you think it is, telling me things about yourself.”

“Yeah, but I’m out of things to tell.” He squinches the leather again. It settles him, which is remarkable because there is something so unsettling about this conversation that he thinks it’ll be the first memory that isn’t a good one. “You don’t want to hear about my parents’ divorce, or my mom getting sick, or the like...two friends I left behind in Florida, neither of whom bother to call or text or check on me even though I try really hard to have my phone on in case they want to talk.”

Jaehyun stays quiet, head leaning against the closed window of the passenger’s side.

“You definitely don’t want to know about how I blew my tiny inheritance drinking because I don’t know what to do with my feelings when people leave me alone.”

Still, he is met with silence.

“What do you want to know, Jaehyun?”

“You said a lot, just now.”

Any and all trace of flirtation is gone, and Jaehyun reaches across the space between them, resting his hand on the outside of Taeyong’s thigh.

“Those aren’t the things that matter. Talking about your trauma isn’t the way to let someone know about you. But those are the things that make a person who they are, and they don’t matter, so.”

“You matter, you know?”

Taeyong steps on the brake, pulls the car to the side of the freeway. The traffic bustles by, ignorant of the drama happening for free just beside them. “What the fuck do you _mean_, I matter?” he demands, turning sharply and looking Jaehyun in the eye. “You say all these things, all these two-word sentences that sound deep and profound, like you’re trying to make me feel better for a half-second before I remember how miserable I am, but what do they really _mean_?”

“Start driving, Taeyong.”

“No, fucking _tell_ me what you mean when you say things!”

“Taeyong, please start driving.”

“_Answer the question!_”

Behind them, some vague approximation of blue-and-red flashes, and a too-loud _whoop-whoop_ sounds over the din of passing cars. The shine of it catches in the rearview, but Taeyong’s half flipped around in the seat, and gets the closest he can to a front-row view.

“Fuck,” he spits, turning in the seat, already feeling around for his wallet, butt lifted off the bench seat, just barely constrained by the ancient belt. “Were you wearing your belt? Where’s your registration?”

“I’m still wearing it right now.” All the colour has drained from Jaehyun’s face, and he’s staring straight ahead, hands making one conjoined fist, a twist of fingers laced together. “Everything’s in the glovebox. Please don’t make me talk to him.”

“I mean, you might have--” 

A tap on the window has Taeyong trying to swallow his own tongue out of shock. He turns just slightly, and leaves one hand on the steering wheel while he leans to crank down the glass of the ancient truck.

“Is everything alright?” asks a uniformed officer, the brim of his Stetson pulled low and the sun glinting off the polished badge he wears on his chest. “Saw you two swerving a little, and then you pulled off. There something wrong with your truck?”

“No sir,” Taeyong says softly, trying to be his most placating self -- such a stark contrast to the hissing anger that he’d shown a moment before that he throws himself off with it. “We’re just trying to figure out where we got lost on the highway, that’s all. I didn’t want to check navigation and drive at the same time, and he doesn’t really know how my phone works.” He flashes a grin, something like conspiratorial, despite the nervousness clutching at his throat. “Android users, you know?”

The officer doesn’t seem pleased about this. “Do you know where you are?”

“Uh..well, sir, the last sign I remember seeing was…” Fuck, what _was_ the last sign he saw? East Texas is nothing but _fucking_ trees, he barely remembers landmarks as important as road signs. He’s mostly just been following Jaehyun’s direction this entire time, the drone of his voice relaxing enough to lull him into complacency -- until it didn’t. “No, sir, I don’t think I do.”

“We’re headed to Nac, but I think we got pointed toward Austin instead,” Jaehyun says, and his voice is straining to fight being caught at a whisper. Taeyong’s never seen “We haven’t had navigation on for some time.” Taeyong shoots him a look. “Sir.”

The officer takes a step back, his gentle potbelly shaking like a Santa Claus of mercy as he clearly tries to hold in a laugh. “You two look so nervous.” Taeyong, for one, does not see anything funny about the situation. Unnamed cop -- Taeyong peers at his badge, engraved with the name Charpentier, and subtly checks him for a body camera in case something horrible goes wrong -- tucks his heavy Maglite back into its strap on his belt, makes a very vague gesture in the direction in which they’re already going. “Overpass, next exit. Follow the signs. Catch the 49 west. You’ll get there just fine.”

Jaehyun shifts like he’s got something to hide, and immediately goes stock-still in his seat. 

“Thank you very much for your help, sir,” Taeyong says, and that well-oiled hustler voice comes in handy here -- where Jaehyun manages to look guilty while doing nothing at all, Taeyong is all saccharine innocence. He might be able to say he hates himself right now, if he were to have any real cognition of what he’s doing.

The cop raises an eyebrow. “Anything else I can help the two of you with?”

“No, sir, I think that’s everything.”

Charpentier narrows his eyes. “License? Registration? Insurance?”

Jaehyun fumbles to get the documents out of the glove compartment, his hands shaking. He’s sweating, the bead that forms on his forehead leaving Taeyong to worry. At least here, with the window hanging wide open, they can blame it on the heat. In time he manages the right papers, foists them off into Taeyong’s hand, faintly soggy fingerprints left in the thin sheaf. In turn Taeyong hands them over to the officer, who barely gives them a glance. He’s waiting for Taeyong’s licence, and he complies in short order, Jaehyun’s obvious anxiety rubbing off on him in a way he hadn’t anticipated it might. Charpentier also doesn’t give Taeyong’s licence much of a look, and hands them both back fairly quickly. “You’re coming from Georgia or Florida?”

“Yes, sir,” they say in an almost haunting unison. Taeyong scrambles to explain. “I left my car in Georgia to get fixed by a friend of ours. It’ll be done by the time we get back. He--” and he jerks a careless thumb in Jaehyun’s direction, “lives in Georgia. Around Dacula.”

Charpentier just sort of hums. “Y’all two be safe out there,” he says at long last, making a slow trudge back to his car.

Soon as the window’s cranked back up, Jaehyun starts hyperventilating. Taeyong, never one to deal well with panic that isn’t his own, flails a bit, takes Jaehyun by the hand, gives it a squeeze. “It’s okay,” he says, and his voice is this tiny murmur that he can’t even believe drips from his own throat, “it’s okay, he left us alone, you’re alright.”

“He didn’t ask for my ID,” Jaehyun manages between staccato gasps, “he might know who I am, oh God, Taeyong, I don’t know how far down I’m wanted, if I’m even wanted at all, can you please just-- fuck, Taeyong--”

And, without anything better to substitute for comfort, Taeyong reaches across the bench seat, taking Jaehyun into his arms.

They stay like this even as Charpentier’s patrol car whizzes past them, intent on catching a speeder judging by the way he clicks on his lights almost immediately.

When Jaehyun finally lifts his head, and Taeyong finally shifts the car back into gear, it can’t really be said whether the foreign salt in the crook of his neck is sweat or tears. He doesn’t ask. Jaehyun might be an enigmatic asshole, and Taeyong might be falling for him, but neither of those things preclude his dignity.

///

When they pull into Austin's city limits a good few hours later, Taeyong stops the truck. They've taken enough breaks; they stopped not an hour ago, but Jaehyun hasn't said a single thing that means anything since the encounter with the Texas Highway Patrol. Honestly, Taeyong wouldn't mind the silence; he's working through some things of his own, not all of them to do with Jaehyun, a fact which surprises him. But there's something so strange about the sudden lack of their now-routine push-and-pull that has Taeyong's nerves frayed, and getting weaker for wear with every passing minute he has to spend in this cursed cab.

"Where are we?" Jaehyun asks, like he's just snapped from some sort of vile reverie.

They're in the parking lot of a run-down diner. It's not fancy, but Taeyong's trying to save for them to have someplace to stay when they're in Austin, less than an hour away. He doesn't say anything, just circles the front of the truck -- it shimmers with summer heat and an exhaustion all its own -- and yanks open Jaehyun's door. "Get out. You need something to eat. I really need something to eat."

"You didn't get anything at any of those stops we made?" Jaehyun gripes, but good-naturedly, even if his face doesn't reflect that. He tries to smile but it never reaches his eyes.

"No. Why would I? You barely wanted to get out of the car." One of the things Taeyong has processed in the silence has been the answer to the question he never got. He's been wondering if maybe he has one of his own. "I'm not going anywhere out here, not without you."

"That sounds like Stockholm syndrome," accuses Jaehyun, sliding out of the seat, groaning when his knees creak beneath his own weight. He, too, must be tired of sitting and riding all day. It's only reasonable, thinks Taeyong, hooking an arm around his and giving him a jerk to shake him from his roadtrip-induced stupor.

They make their way into the nightmarish diner, Taeyong watching its barely-lit sign flicker out of the corner of his eye, all the way through the double front doors. They wait til they're seated, and the server brings them coffee and water and offers them their menus. Neither of them really look at each other, but it somehow goes unspoken that they end up sharing the same side of an enormous booth.

"What do you want?" asks Taeyong, a little sharper than he intends; he takes a deep breath, tries again. "It's whatever you like, okay? I'm paying. Don't worry about it."

"Why would I worry about that?" Another, even weaker attempt at humour. Jaehyun's fading, a ghost passing from this plane of existence into another. It sort of breaks Taeyong's heart.

He doesn't say anything, instead picks at the already peeling corner of the lamination on the menu with his fingernail.

They stay like this, in peaceful coexistence, for a very long time. They order -- Taeyong a stack of pancakes the menu claims will be bigger than his head; Jaehyun something with a lot of meat -- and occasionally shift so that their elbows brush together. For all his pathetic bullshit, Taeyong wishes this were more intentional than it really is.

Finally, the question occurs to him. "Is it hard, always thinking they're going to be looking for you?"

Jaehyun's breath visibly catches, his chest swollen with it, his eyes wide and dull. "That's not what I expected you to ask me."

"Yeah, but it's what I want to know." The spoon he uses to stir his coffee -- two cream, five sugar -- clanks against the inside of the cup, giving him pause to think. "Does it always get that bad for you?"

A shrug, a brief stretch of quiet, interrupted by the jangling of silverware against plates and cups. "It hasn't been that bad for awhile. It's easier when someone else is there, in case I can't drive after it happens."

_Is that why you wanted me around?_ Taeyong's mind asks, but his tongue manages to stay stuck behind his teeth. "Does it happen any other time?"

"When I can't drive. Or when we're not moving, I should say." Another shrug, but this time, Jaehyun's flushed all the way up to the tips of his ears. "I think I've just been going so long that nothing makes sense when I have to stay still."

"Are you going to have to stay still when you make it where you're going out west?"

Jaehyun seems to think about this, and it's long enough a pause that their food arrives. They're both grateful for the distraction of filling their bellies, judging by the tangible release of tension in the air. Taeyong stuffs his mouth with blueberry pancake to keep from getting in the middle of whatever's going on in Jaehyun's head. "I think," he says finally, cutting into a puck of sausage. "I think I'll have things to do as long as I stay in the family."

"Is that what you guys call each other?"

"Sometimes. More often than not it's more like...that's just what we are. It doesn't have to be said. Do you have siblings?"

"Not really. She exists. I don't know her."

"I have them, you know? I didn't have any growing up--"

"I couldn't tell that at all." Taeyong snorts, takes another bite to stuff any potential regret.

"--but I have them. We'd do anything for each other, even when we argue and things go weird and we don't want to stick out our necks for anything more than we already have. Even the ones I don't like. It's not about blood. It's about... it's about surviving the same things."

"Do they know you get like that?" The curiosity is killer. Taeyong kicks the metal pole keeping the table in place, a reminder that talking too much gets him in trouble.

"Doyoung does. Woo probably does too, since he and I used to sleep together."

"Sleep together how," Taeyong deadpans, pretending that he didn't just drop his knife and fork at the sudden revelation.

"In the same bed," and now Jaehyun's laughing, but Taeyong can't pinpoint exactly why -- whether he's done something worth being self-conscious about, or there's something else in Jaehyun's head that he's got going on that he doesn't feel like letting anyone in on. "It wasn't sex. I don't think I could have sex with Jungwoo even if I tried. And anyway, he's got his man. They've been in love longer than I can remember."

Taeyong stares into the slow pool of syrup congealing on the empty side of his plate. “They’re really your family, huh.”

“Yeah. I don’t know if any of the rest of them see it that way, considering...well, everything.” Jaehyun’s hands shake when he reaches for his coffee cup. “Johnny and Doyoung, probably Yuta and Sicheng…” He takes a sip, singes the tip of his tongue, makes a face of deep displeasure. “This shit tastes burned,” he whines.

“I can’t tell the difference.”

“Oh, that’s just pathetic. You can’t taste it? It tastes like your cigarettes smell.”

They both laugh. Under the table they link their unoccupied hands, just for a moment, and it’s that life-changing shit Taeyong had dreaded just a few days prior. There are stars in both their eyes, innumerable and bright, and all he can think is that he is in far more trouble than he’d bargained for.

“Hey, uh,” Jaehyun says as they’re headed back to the truck, full of breakfast and something that tastes vaguely like regret, “I may have forgotten to tell you, but we’re meeting with someone once we get where we’re going.”

There’s that ice cold dread dripping down the back of Taeyong’s throat, a stark contrast to the dinner that had warmed him. “Who?”

“I think Yuta. Doyoung didn’t say exactly who it was, but...he’s the one that travels the most often, so it’s a pretty safe bet.”

Taeyong heaves himself into the truck on the passenger side, his insides threatening revolt as he grips tight at the handle over the window. “Yuta did not seem happy to see me last time we were in the same room.” 

Jaehyun agrees with a nod, a low hum of acknowledgment. “Yuta isn’t very happy a lot of the time. Something about hiding out really wears on him. He likes attention more than he says.” He starts the truck, but then just lays there, slumped against the high back of the bench seat, one arm draped over its head, hand just behind Taeyong’s shoulder. “Sicheng likes attention too. They get along best when no one else is around, if you listen to Sicheng tell it.”

Taeyong rests his head in Jaehyun’s outstretched palm, acclimates them both to casual contact -- he’s thought about this, too, and has figured they’re ready, if Jaehyun wants to try. “I believe it. He was definitely trying to look sexy when I met him.”

Jaehyun throws back his own head, and laughs and laughs and laughs. “Did it work?” he finally asks, when he can breathe again and he’s wiped the tears from the corners of his eyes.

Taeyong’s heart stills, just a moment. “I don’t think I remember seeing anyone like that but you.”

That shuts them both up. Taeyong straightens up, crossing his arms over his chest and staring down at the floorboards. Jaehyun puts the car in gear, backs out of the parking lot -- a miracle, considering the shit job done by the last operator of the vehicle.

When his right hand isn’t occupied, Jaehyun rests it flat against the seat beside him. Taeyong reaches for it, and it’s earth-shattering all over again, how much he likes just holding hands.

///

It’s an hour and a half to the opposite side of Austin, long enough that their stomachs don’t feel so full. They don’t have anywhere to sleep, but Taeyong is bone-tired, doesn’t even want to think about sleeping in the truck another night. Though he’s only done it twice to date, his back cracks at the idea of it. He suggests they get a hotel while Jaehyun is driving slow, hazards on, trying to find something. Someone. Taeyong doesn’t know which might be more distinctive, and doesn’t ask.

“You want a bed?” Taeyong says it like a pet owner dangling a treat over their child’s head. “Please. My back is killing me from all the driving. Please? I’ll pay for it.”

Jaehyun, for the record, is peering out over the dashboard, trying to see into the evening. “Just give me a minute, okay? I’ve only been here once.”

“This would be so much easier if you had an _address_. I could _navigate_. On my _phone_.” Taeyong’s mostly teasing, although he does take his hand back to rest it on his anxiously jiggling knee. He craves a smoke, left his crumpled, mostly empty pack somewhere across state lines, and can’t wait to get himself another one. “Can we stop at a store?” It needles at him, the craving -- tacks under bare feet. 

“Yeah.” Jaehyun points to a conspicuous house, bright yellow and peeling away from reality where it stands, swaying in the wind. “That’s the place.”

Taeyong flashes him a disapproving frown. “Are you sure…?”

“Yep! Look at it. It’s _unmistakable_.”

True, it does look different than its peers. Dramatically different, if Taeyong tells the truth. It’s another one of those spaces that makes Taeyong think he might be forever drifting toward the afterlife instead of something real and tangible. He wants to sleep. A glance at his near-dead phone tells him it’s after midnight. Jaehyun peels around the corner, drags Taeyong to several metal-barred convenience stores with no lights save the sign announcing their corporate affiliation; each one fills him with a greater sense of disappointment than he can explain. At long last they pull into the parking lot of a store that’s still open, ancient cars sitting like jagged teeth along the storefront gumline. 

“You want anything?” Taeyong asks as he hops down out of the cab, hitting the pavement too hard.

“Coffee? Black, one sugar.”

“I saw that back at the diner, you monster,” Taeyong teases with a grin. He spins away, blowing a kiss Jaehyun’s direction. “Are we going to be able to sleep at that shack?”

“Oh, no. Yuta doesn’t live there. No one has for a long time. Go in the store before someone decides you’re too pretty not to shake down.”

Taeyong does what he’s told. Inside the door is a cacophony: a dozen different slot machines, each with their own distinctive sounds and their own operator. There are conversations, good and bad and indifferent. The air is heavy with smoke. The cashier is holding a sleeping baby. “What can I get you, sweetheart?”

“Camel Turkish Royal.” Taeyong leans on the counter, looks into the baby’s eyes. “And a large coffee.” He glances at the child, bouncing and cooing. “Yours?”

“Nope, one of theirs,” and the cashier pauses pressing buttons to hitch the child up her hip, point in the direction of the machines. “I’m just a babysitter this late at night. Only time they ever talk to me is when they need more change to play.”

There may have been a time, Taeyong thinks as he waits for his card to read in the whirring ancient machine, where he had felt the same about this adventure he’s on. But after today, after breakfast for dinner and holding Jaehyun while he’d shaken out the worst of the panic, he isn’t sure he can. He eyes the cashier with something like sympathy, grateful for the change, and declines his receipt when she slides the cigarettes across the counter and toward him. 

The truck is still running when he hits the pavement again, coffee in hand; Jaehyun is reclining in the driver’s seat, staring out the windshield, thinking himself unseen. Taeyong rushes to his side, taps on the window, jarring him from his thoughts and earning himself a dirty look in the process. Jaehyun cranks down the window, flashes that dimpled grin. “Where are you going, stranger?” he asks, all playful, and it’s almost, _almost_ like this afternoon never happened at all.

“Oh, with this guy,” Taeyong says, leaning on the window track with one elbow and looking up at Jaehyun through his lashes, the overgrown fringe of faded pink blocking his vision. “He’s pretty handsome, and he puts up with my bullshit, but…” He glances around, drops his voice to a whisper. “I think he might be a little dangerous.”

“What makes you think that?” Jaehyun, too, whispers, smile multiplying, perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth glinting in the parking lot lights.

“He told me he was going out west,” Taeyong says, fighting a giggle, “and he wanted to show me California.”

“Well, then. Let me sweep you off your feet,” Jaehyun says, gesturing to the passenger seat, the universal sign for _get in_. “I know better things to do and places to see than even California.”

“So do I,” Taeyong agrees, straightening. “All of them are him.”

He doesn’t miss the way Jaehyun turns bright red as he circles the hood of the car, slides into his own seat. Funny, how quickly things change.

They drive in quiet, Taeyong idly tapping the top of his pack against his thigh like it’s going to do anything, already fully in acceptance that he’s probably going to be picking tobacco off his tongue for however long it takes him to finish all twenty smokes. Jaehyun’s quicker to find the yellow house this time, and it sways in the wind dangerously, threatening to collapse.

"Is this really where you're meeting Yuta?" asks Taeyong, leaning into the dash and draping his elbows over it, chin tucked onto the back of his wrist.

"Yeah," says Jaehyun, and Taeyong swears he detects a hint of reluctance in that usually easy tone of his.

They fall out of the truck easy enough, finally giving it the rest it deserves. "Are we going to get a hotel after this?" Taeyong asks in a decidedly low voice, not wanting to disturb what appears to be a fragile peace as they traipse the crooked, broken walkway. "Cause I am exhausted. And I miss beds." He does nothing to hide the vague idea of flirtation he's got, tickling the fringes of his mind; if Jaehyun hears it, so be it.

"Yeah, we can think about it." Jaehyun gently nudges Taeyong's ribs with an elbow as they come to the landing. Taeyong sort of misses the verandas the more eastern parts of this trip had afforded him. Jaehyun knocks on the door, and they wait. Seconds tick by like hours, and minutes like days.

Finally the door opens, revealing sickly yellow light from a single bulb. There is a man with a boxy smile and a dumbstruck look in his eyes. Taeyong recognises him, of course, having met him a couple states over, in a bar the likes of which he wishes he could forget.

"Jaehyun," Yuta says with a sly grin, "I didn't think you were coming tonight. I was, uh, asleep."

"Bullshit," Jaehyun says, reflecting that same look, "you've never slept a day in your life." The door swings open of its own accord, and Jaehyun and Yuta wrap one another in this huge embrace, like lifelong friends separated by a prison sentence. The irony is not lost on Taeyong one bit. "Are you gonna make me and my friend stand out here all night?"

"No, shut up, I'm just tired," Yuta says with some vague approximation of a groan, taking a couple shuffling steps back and giving Taeyong a weary up-and-down. "Nice to see you didn't ditch."

"Does this make me part of a life of crime now?" Taeyong jokes. Yuta throws his head back and laughs, something musical and magical, something out of one of those Disney films everyone wishes for but few achieve. "Seriously, uh, I'm sorry if I was a dick before--"

"You were trying to be honest." Yuta shuffles across a concrete floor -- judging by the oil spots this room is supposed to be a garage, and there's another side door leading into what looks through the window like a kitchen, which they all trudge into -- and glances at Taeyong over his shoulder. "I don't meet a lot of people who hang out with Jaehyun who do that." There's something accusatory about it, not that Taeyong either knows the context or cares to find out. "So, no, you weren't a dick."

"What are you even doing out here?" To the left of the door is a couch, a banquet-style dining table with a computer setup; Jaehyun flops down on it, never once taking his eyes off Yuta. "More cybercrime shit? You know hacking banks isn't going to work."

"You get dumber every time I see you," Yuta singsongs. "That computer has a lot of important information on it. A lot of important buyers with a lot of important money. The kind that comes already clean."

Jaehyun snorts, draws up his knees so that Taeyong can take a seat on the couch, rest his temple on his shin. "I think _you're_ the one getting dumber." He takes a more serious tack. "You know Doyoung's never gonna take that money to the bank."

"Yeah, I know," sniffs Yuta, busy in the kitchen pouring himself a cup of coffee into a chipped yellow mug. "You mean to tell me you're gonna spend the rest of your time running for Doyoung's operations? Driving that truck until it gives out?"

"Nah," Jaehyun replies airily, "I gave Doyoung the account this morning. He's in charge of everything now, which I'm sure is exactly what he wanted."

Yuta leans against the counter, gaze fixed on Jaehyun, a frown disgracing his otherwise lovely mouth. "You know Taeil set that shit up like he did for a reason. He and Johnny both decided it was better not to give _him_\--” and he makes a significant gesture, like they both know what giving Doyoung things will do, “anything."

"Yeah, well, Taeil and Johnny are both out of it, so what's it matter to them." Jaehyun doesn't seem half as amused as he did before. "Is Sicheng still out there in the mountains growing?"

"Nah, he sold that farm a little while back. Got good money for it, too. Good for us he's got that weirdly green thumb, right?" The grin is back, just as quickly as it'd come, and Taeyong thinks it strange he can't see a stranger but in a certain light. "The berries make almost as much as the pot." He snorts into his cup.

The amount of deciphering this conversation takes is making Taeyong sleepy; he halfway considers asking for a cup of coffee before deciding against it. He tips his head slightly in Jaehyun's direction, a cat nuzzling round a hand for affection. "Hey, don't let me fall asleep," he asks in his softest voice.

Before Jaehyun can even react Yuta's pulling a mug down from the cabinet, its door half hanging off its hinges, the top half sat lower than it should be. "Drink coffee, young man," says Yuta, with mock solemnity. "It's the only way you can survive the long, dark night."

"What are we even here for?" Taeyong chances to ask, caution in the way he fits his fingers around Jaehyun's ankle, gives it a squeeze.

"You owe me money," Yuta says in full dramatic intonation. He then curbs the darkness with a shrug, shoving the now-full cup into Taeyong's hands. "Actually, no, I'm kidding, I have one last piece of something that Jaehyun here has to take to Taeil before he stops talking to any of us. Also, Jaehyun here--" and his tone shifts into something almost patronising, the way he coos with heavy eyes charming in a way Taeyong hadn't expected of him, "is my widdle baby and I'd die if anything happened to him, so I'm making sure nothing happens to him."

The pillow behind Jaehyun's head goes flying across the room, missing Yuta only by a narrow margin, squawking out an indignant 'fuck you' in his friend's direction. "You have it, don't you?" he asks, when the raucous laughter dies down.

"Doyoung wouldn't've sent you here if I didn't." Yuta shrugs again. He crosses the little house, nearly tripping over odds and ends here and there -- legs broken off furniture, a baseball bat, a couple anime figurines laying on their sides abandoned. Taeyong wonders how many of these things are intended as weaponry. Nestled in the corner is a heavy safe. Yuta tries a couple times with fumbling fingers to get the right combination in, finally gets it open, nearly wrenches the door from its hinge in his excitement. Then he withdraws, hand wrapped around a handle.

Taeyong backs up, butt to the back of the couch, perched atop it like a cat who's trying to escape a dog. "That is a gun," he states, gravely at that, voice all gravel and broken glass, having forgotten exactly who he's dealing with. "That is a motherfucking gun!"

"Yeah, what'd you think it'd be, a..." Yuta squints, screws up his mouth. "Tried to say water gun, but that's a bad nonsequitur. Make up your own, I guess."

"I don't know, _not a motherfucking gun_." Taeyong seizes, all his muscles tense, trying to draw in on himself. Behind the couch is just the wall, nothing for him to climb into, though he'd like to fall down a rabbit hole and never be in this room again. "What the fuck?" He whips his head around, staring down his nose at Jaehyun, waiting for some explanation.

Jaehyun doesn't offer one, and Taeyong doesn't know what the fuck he expected.

"You're gonna get it to him okay?" Yuta asks, crossing the room once more to tuck the weapon into Jaehyun's hand. Immediately it's checked to make sure it's unloaded, that the safety is on, that everything is going to be alright. As if supplemental to the ungiven explanation, Jaehyun shoots Taeyong a look.

"I'll take it where it needs to go," Jaehyun agrees, lazily tucking the barrel into the waistband of his dirty jeans. "You know somewhere we can stay tonight?"

"Oh, you don't wanna stay here?" Yuta cracks a ghost of a smile, but there's something uneasy about it that Taeyong doesn't really have words for.

Jaehyun snickers under his breath. "You don't have beds here that you and Sicheng haven't fucked in."

Yuta sputters, beet red in a half-second, and some of the tension leaves Taeyong's frame at long last, leaking a distressed, high-pitched laugh of his own.

///

The hotel is markedly worse than the last one, Taeyong able to hear the gentle crawling of vermin in the paper-thin walls. He wonders how hard he'd have to hit to unleash a wave of rodents and mice, and dreams of Tupelo, dreams of the truck bed, dreams of his childhood bedroom with the off-white walls and the too-wide windows. Anything but here.

Jaehyun has this adaptability to him, though, and settles in for the night with a quickness that catches Taeyong off-guard. They don't undress -- the blankets are scratchy and Taeyong mutters something about scabies living in the sheets -- but they crawl into bed nonetheless. Jaehyun's arms fit around Taeyong's waist almost immediately, and there's something so automatic about it, so unpractised but perfect, that Taeyong's breath sticks in his throat, trapped behind his suddenly-heavy tongue. "I'm sorry," Jaehyun whispers, lips brushing the shell of Taeyong's ear.

Taeyong shivers at the contact. "It's fine, this was...what, the fifth place we came to?" He smiles warmly at the memory of Jaehyun nodding off in the passenger's seat. "We need to sleep, I don't care. The door's locked, we can take a shower whenever we feel like it... everything is okay."

They fall asleep so quickly that when morning peeks through the broken blinds Taeyong doesn't remember a thing, not a dream, not a twitch, not getting up to pee at 4am. But he's warm and safe and cared for. Jaehyun hasn't moved. They stay like this a long while, Taeyong occasionally drifting in and out of sleep, though there's something in his very center that itches to get moving, the sooner to California the better.

Eventually Jaehyun rolls away, groaning with the effort of disentangling himself, and Taeyong silently pads to the suite bathroom to get himself naked and clean. He turns the handle for the tap every which way, but the water never heats up, not in twenty futile minutes that feel like the longest of Taeyong's life. He stares at it, despondent.

Jaehyun files in behind him, shirt off but draped over his well-shaped shoulder, nearly enough to distract. "What's wrong?"

"We can't shower." The words strangle from him, an anguished moan.

"I love how you keep saying how we can't shower like you're planning on doing it together."

"The water isn't hot. It hasn't been hot this whole time."

"Wait, seriously?" Jaehyun frowns, brow furrowing, and fuck, how does he even manage to make anger look that good? Taeyong would hate him for it if he had it in him to hate at all. "Let me go talk to management for a minute."

"No, Jaehyun, wait--"

"I'm serious," and Jaehyun's already left the bathroom before Taeyong can turn on his heel, insist they just leave; he's shrugging into his shirt and Taeyong mourns the loss, "we don't have the money for another place, you deserve a refund. We deserve a refund."

Taeyong doesn't have a logical counterargument to this, and lets Jaehyun go.

It takes a few minutes, Taeyong lingering in the bathroom for far too long before planting himself on the frayed edge of the bed, nerves on edge. He'd really been looking forward to unwinding a little under a piping-hot spray. (His brain tries to supplement a dirty version of the same sentiment, but he, turning scarlet under his own thoughts, shushes it with a quickness.) Eventually Jaehyun returns, all disappointment and head hung low. "What happened?"

"They said they couldn't do anything about it," sighs Jaehyun, flopping face-up in their unmade bed, "and that we're lucky we got to stay here at all, considering the fact that we didn't get in until as late as we did."

That's shitty. Taeyong's mouth echoes the same sentiment, laying beside Jaehyun, a little frown tugging at the corners of his mouth. Why hadn't he thought to shower while he'd been in civilisation? Sure, it would've been tight quarters, Doyoung's kids getting ready for whatever it was they did since they clearly didn't have jobs or attend school of any kind, but Taeyong could've had the foresight enough to know something like this would come up. It always would.

He almost doesn't notice the subtle shifting of weight beside him, the arm snaking its way across his waist. "We could always go find somewhere else to shower."

Taeyong groans at the idea of going out to eat looking like he does now, but figures he doesn't have much he can do about it. "Can we at least go pick up some clean clothes?"

Jaehyun flashes a smile, leans in so his lips brush against Taeyong's ear, they both caught up in the way he shudders without even meaning to. "Look up the nearest thrift spot and we'll think about it, alright? I need coffee before I get any further outside city limits."

For his part Taeyong makes a sound of deep dissatisfaction, and rolls so that he's facing Jaehyun, and pouts. "You're bossy. And tall. Sort of tall."

They're close enough to kiss, and Taeyong knows with every piece of himself that he doesn't imagine the brief flicker of Jaehyun's gaze to the pushed-out swell of his lips. "Yeah, but you kind of like it," he finally says, after a lifetime's span passes between them.

///

Dressed in new clothes, foregoing breakfast, Taeyong and Jaehyun make for further west. Jaehyun says that El Paso is going to be their next stop, but Taeyong can already foresee the problem in this: He feels like a grease stain upon humanity, and can't possibly imagine what anyone could find attractive about him on a day like this. The further they drive, the more arid the heat becomes, and while this might be a welcome respite to the vague humidity Austin and its surrounding metropolitan area might have cursed upon him, all it's doing right now is making him keenly aware of the sweat practically caked to his skin with how quickly it dries out.

Jaehyun looks like he feels something similar, judging by the desperate tug of his mouth downward. They keep their mouths shut, their easy flirtation forgotten in favour of finding a gas station. When they find one they stock up on water, roll the windows up, blow the already-struggling A/C. They both mumble something about Freon in the same moment, and burst into giggles.

The drive stretches on, the land becoming sandier the longer they go. Taeyong, for one, is fascinated.

"What's with the gun?" Taeyong finally chances to ask, once he remembers it sitting under their feet, the floorboards their only protection against an accidental firing. Not that that's possible, both Yuta and Jaehyun having gone over it to make sure it's unloaded and all that good business. Super safe gun. Still, it makes him uneasy, now that he's awake enough to appreciate the gravity of the situation.

"Taeil wants to get rid of it." Jaehyun lifts a shoulder just before raising a sweating bottle of water to his mouth. "I don't know anything except what I'm told."

"Is that common with your, uh, family?" Taeyong does his best to hedge, but he's truly grown curious about the nature of their relationships beyond what he's been shown. It's stupid, he thinks, but people usually present them their best selves, not anything even remotely resembling authentic. He thinks that, Jungwoo back in Georgia aside -- his infinite sadness no longer having a place to reside in caring for others at the end of the night, he'd crumbled, taken comfort where it hadn't been offered, and Taeyong's admired him for it ever since -- most of Jaehyun's friends have been worried about impressing him rather than the other way round. He's not sure he likes it, even if he is impressed. "You guys don't tell everyone everything about what's going on?"

"Yeah," and Jaehyun makes it sound like heavy secrets are something easy, something to be expected. "Families are like that."

Taeyong, unexpectedly, thinks of his mother, of sitting up with her late at night as her insides had revolted, buying her weed so she could manage to eat between rounds of chemo, helping her shave her head with a neighbours' clippers, doing it to himself but only in spots because she had begged him to keep some of it. That bad dye job will live with him forever. He can't think of keeping secrets from her, and she was his family, and they probably shared an inappropriate amount. He remembers he has a father, that they're pretty much setting a direct course that way, and corrects himself. "Some families," he tells Jaehyun, glance flickering between the rolling scenery outside the passenger's side window and the object of his affection.

"You and your mom were close?"

"She was my best friend."

Jaehyun doesn't seem to know what to say to this for a long while, drains the water he's been drinking while he thinks of a good response. "You miss her?"

"Every day." Taeyong finishes his own, too, crumpling the bottle between his fingers and replacing the cap so the bottle retains its ruined shape. "She would've liked you."

"What, she liked bad boys with hearts of gold?"

"No," and here Taeyong laughs, indignation brimming in him, quiet like the promise of a waxing moon to come, "she liked things that made me happy. Me being happy made her happy."

Some part of him expects to hear a snippet of Jaehyun's childhood that he hasn't yet, but it doesn't matter, because he's long since abandoned the notion of forcing anything out of anyone. That behaviour is probably what caused Jaehyun to feel how he does about his family of origin, and far be it from Taeyong to resemble something Jaehyun's trying to escape.

The quiet, when it falls is an easy one, a shorter one than Taeyong had anticipated. "They're just stupid rich," Jaehyun mumbles. "Rich enough that they didn't have to raise me if they didn't want to. And granted, I didn't really want them to. They think I don't know, but my mom's been having affairs with their staff since I was a kid."

"Is that why the family?" Taeyong winces soon as it's out of his mouth. Gross oversimplification is something he hates in other people, yet apparently something he's guilty of himself.

"Yes and no." Jaehyun checks the mirrors as he drives, a habit. "I think it was just because...I don't know. Johnny was doing it. Johnny was my brother before anyone else was, you know? A little older, a little smarter, and someone I really looked up to. It's what he did, so it's what I wanted to do."

Taeyong doesn't remember having friends like that. "I mean...I think I was like that, when I was younger? But Dad wasn't around, and Mom was having a hard time...I sort of had to figure it out with her."

"Was she young?"

"I think she was 19 when she had me. Don't quote me on that." He doesn't expect the discomfort, shifts in his seat under its weight, tugging at his seatbelt.

Jaehyun just smiles. "My mom was 20. Trophy wife before her life even started." He pauses, licks his lips, grins, teasing. "Was she as pretty as you?"

"Dude, don't hit on me by talking about my very young, very dead mom."

"Okay, fair point." Jaehyun barks out a laugh and -- is that a hint of awkwardness? He's coloured up to the tips of his ears. Taeyong has come to expect a lot of things out of Jaehyun, but shyness has never been one of them. He isn't sure why. Something about that face, hinting at confidence Taeyong himself has never given himself. "You are, though. Pretty. I'm sure if you two look even a little alike she had her fair share of people wanting to take her out."

Taeyong thinks about this a second, then says, "She had a girlfriend for a little while. Maybe less than a year, maybe right at that. I just remember waking up and this wild-looking hippy-ass white lady was barefoot in our kitchen making me breakfast."

This draws a real chuckle that burbles low in Jaehyun's chest, and oh, but Taeyong's fond of the sound. "In Florida? You don't say."

"Oh, don't make fun of me, Massachusetts," Taeyong drawls with a roll of his eyes. "And no, not in Florida. We hadn't gone there yet. I want to say this was in California still, but after awhile we moved around so much that it all kind of blurs together. Don't think I haven't noticed you not talking about your family. What about your dad?"

The amusement between them expires quickly as it had come. Jaehyun's smiling mouth presses into a flat line, his eyes going dead. "He was definitely not a dad," he says, clearing his throat at the effort, and that's all Taeyong needs to hear. He launches into a story about his old dealer, some kid a couple grades younger than him who'd been all too thrilled to sell him a bag of oregano, and how his mom had been so disappointed that he'd seen it in her eyes as soon as he presented it to her.

That, at least, draws something less negative out of the whole conversation.

Eventually he works up the nerve to ask, "Where are we going?"

"El Paso! I already told you."

"Yeah, but..." Taeyong thinks of the pitifully short stack of bills burning a hole into his back pocket. "We can't afford another hotel."

"We _can_ afford a truck stop shower. I know a place on the way, it's just a little while."

"Do you know all the back highways out west, too?" Taeyong curls his fingers round his knee, then thinks better of the gesture, reaches over and brushes his fingertips against the outside of Jaehyun's thigh.

"I studied maps a lot when I was a kid. Learned all the major freeways. The au pair always told me that she would put me to sleep and I'd just be rattling off numbers. Turns out they were sequences to get places. I thought a lot about Missouri, it seems."

Taeyong lets his hand linger, even wriggles in his seatbelt so he might get that extra half-inch closer, not so much craving the warmth of another body -- God knows they don't need it -- as wanting Jaehyun to know he's right there. "You liked driving?"

"No one cares if rich kids drive underage. Just bring them back to their parents to take care of them. Cops in rich neighbourhoods are more worried about keeping their jobs than keeping the peace, and my parents would've had anyone's badge in a half-second if they ever thought I would end up in the back of a squad car." He snorts, an ugly sound, and Taeyong sits with it, trying to determine whether or not he detects a hint of sadness that goes along with it. "I think that's a part of the whole life of crime thing, too, y'know? Because they were so embarrassed whenever someone in our neighbourhood broke the law. They threw fits over parking tickets. Always so worried about reputations."

Taeyong, for the record, is thinking about how he never settled in one place long enough to figure out whether reputations were only as good as the people who upheld him. Something about not making friends anywhere he went -- not ones that mattered, not ones that lasted more than a season -- made him realise that being happy was something he did by himself. Or at least with his little family, his two-person unit against the world. "I can't even imagine how hard that must have been for you," he says at last.

"I don't know, Taeyong," says Jaehyun at the exact same time. "Sorry. I just...I didn't want to belong to anything because belonging to something like that scared the shit out of me. They wanted me to go to medical school. Can you see me as a doctor?"

Now he's filled with the mental image of Jaehyun in private practise -- dressed in the white coat, of course -- and feels a strange but ultimately familiar pooling between his parted thighs. "I mean," and here he mumbles, colouring carmine himself, "you definitely would have a great bedside manner."

Jaehyun seems relieved for the change of subject. "What would you know about my bedside manner?" he asks, batting his lashes, and it's all sort of downhill from there.

///

They do eventually find that truckstop Jaehyun had promised halfway across the world ago. It's not even a gross place, Taeyong is surprised to find -- a host to a population unused to luxury, there's even a sauna somewhere within the depths. Jaehyun, clinging to Taeyong, arm around his. They’re in perfect step with one another, pulls him to the front counter, barely sidestepping the various lingering patrons who are deciding what coffee to drink, what energy supplement will get them through the long haul. "Hey, we don't have credits," and he says everything with the practised ease of someone who's been living out of their truck for probably forever; Taeyong is convinced he shouldn't be surprised. "Do we pay you for a shower?"

The cashier is already pressing a series of buttons on the register. "The wait's kind of long. You got some time?"

Jaehyun cracks a smile. "We've got all the time in the world."

Taeyong pays with a couple of his remaining bills, takes a receipt with an enormous block-letter number on it and stuffs it into his pocket. They shuffle into the store, looking at various travel trinkets and doodads. Jaehyun tries on every hat. Taeyong fixates on sunglasses. They both pass the beer cave in tandem, arms slung around one another’s shoulders.

"You want a drink?" asks Jaehyun, like it's a treat instead of the necessity Taeyong's made it out to be this past week or so.

"No, not at all," Taeyong says softly, and pushes the comically-large, yellow-tint aviators he has no intention of buying further up his nose. For the first time in a long time, he means it.

Eventually that block-print number is called over the loudspeaker. Jaehyun ducks out of the truck stop with a gentle order to _leave the door open_, ushering Taeyong toward the hallway where the gentle sounds of rain hitting bathroom tile can be heard. Taeyong, for the record, flashes utter bewilderment over his shoulder back at the comical dust cloud where Jaehyun's afterimage watches him go. Ha. Funny. He shows the paper to the attendant, who directs him where he needs to be: a private stall, its own little bathroom. It's not the most luxurious thing he's experienced, but then again, he'd managed to get clean under foot-washing mists on Florida beaches. He thinks back to their hotel room just a few hours away, shudders, and closes the door behind him, careful not to lock it.

Taeyong's just finished getting most of the way undressed when the knock comes at his shower door -- shave and a haircut. He rolls his eyes, gently cracks the door open, is met with a smile that makes his heart absolutely melt, and for a moment wishes he could go back in time, tell the self he'd been a week ago the things that he knows now.

"Can I join you?" asks Jaehyun, shouldering his way inside anyway, "I brought towels. They don't usually have those here."

"Where'd you get those?" Taeyong cocks an eyebrow with a great deal of scepticism.

"You'd be surprised the number of things you can hide behind a bench seat." The door latches behind the pair of them, and Jaehyun reaches behind himself blindly to seal their fate. Then he drags his eyes slowly, deliberately up the length of Taeyong's frame.

He wants to cover himself, play at being shy -- but then, shy's never what they've been, unless conversation counts. He leans against the wall, lets himself be surveyed, sure that this is the extent of the devouring and surer still he'd ask to be consumed again. Then Jaehyun shrugs out of his shirt, slowly, suggestion plain in the way he moves. It's nothing Taeyong hasn't seen before, but this heaviness, this incredible tension leaves his mouth dry, tasting of a phantom river he hasn't had in his mouth for days.

"Can I kiss you?" Jaehyun, ever the gentleman, moves closer, always so respectful of Taeyong's space.

In turn he takes Jaehyun by the hips, drags the pair of them together chest-to-chest, and crashes their lips together with a hunger that even the heaviest moon would understand. They fumble, Jaehyun still half-clothed, mumbling something against Taeyong's mouth about how they don't have much time in here. Catching himself, Taeyong's fingers curl against taut muscles, pulling closer, greedy in the way that only people who're trying to fill some void can be, wanting, craving.

"Wanted to do this for days," Taeyong murmurs between heated passes of lips to lips, tongue swiping at the plush pad of Jaehyun's lower. "Since I met you." Their tongues make fervent swipes against one another, exploring everything that's been forbidden to them, everything they've been too afraid to take without making sure it was _right_ first.

"Why'd you wait?" asks Jaehyun, breathless, arms slung shameless around Taeyong's neck. He cradles Taeyong like he's something revered, like they're back in hotels rooms, whispering into darkness what they haven't been able to tell each other.

"You're worth waiting on," says Taeyong, and it's so simple, but Jaehyun positively moans with it, loud enough there's no doubt someone outside that flimsy shower door hears.

They don't have the patience to do much of the touching their fingers itch to do, end up rutting against one another, hard-ons brushing together as the shower leaks behind them, an intrusion on an imperfectly perfect moment. All the while Taeyong is consumed by the burning of it, filled completely in that soul-touched way. Jaehyun is firm and lean and warm and takes care of Taeyong even when he's just as needy, even when he can’t manage to kick his jeans the rest of the way off. He ends up pressed into Taeyong's tummy, cock hard and leaking, held up by nothing save sheer anticipation.

Taeyong comes first, but Jaehyun is close behind. They hadn’t even had it in them to get naked properly, but then, desperation to keep someone around, let them know they’re needed -- it does that to a person.

When they're both spent and even more in need of a shower than they had been on arrival, Taeyong rests his sweat-beaded forehead against the hollow of Jaehyun's sculpted shoulder. Jaehyun kisses his crown, nose nestling in the nest of pink that's sure to fade the rest of the way out by the time they leave this room.

"Next time," says Jaehyun, and Taeyong would be lying if he said his heart didn't swell with it, "I'm going to treat you like you deserve to be treated."

It's nearly enough to get him hard all over again, but they've got business to do. Taeyong, for one, can't wait until this trip is over, and when he closes his eyes he's got half a mind on beaches he's never seen, kisses he'll be more than happy to take, spending the days living on someone else’s stolen money.

///

It’s just west of El Paso, right across the border, at a fork in the freeway, that things get surreal, though Taeyong’s convinced it’s because there are aliens afoot, won’t accept any other alternative. For one, he’s drunk and delirious on denying himself things -- he’s something like an addict, has the poorest impulse control he’s ever seen in a functioning person -- and that in itself is making him lose it a little. For two, he can’t stop thinking about what kind of hustle it would take to get them a hotel room for a couple days -- he’s yet to drink his fill of Jaehyun, and has no qualms admitting it to either of them. For yet another, Jaehyun flat refuses to go to Roswell.

“Not even for a little bit?”

“It’s north of where we’re trying to go.”

“Yeah, but I wanna see aliens…”

There’s something that’s got Jaehyun frayed at the edges, but he hasn’t said what it is yet. Taeyong hasn’t thought to ask, so mindlessly obsessed with the idea of storming Area 51 like a one-man rescue team that while he’s noticed it, he doesn’t know how to broach the subject. "I know you want to see aliens." Jaehyun's gentle like he usually is, but it's an effort. "We'll come back. I just really... I need to get rid of this thing, and we're running out of money, and it really isn't that far away in terms of driving, just..."

"Hey." Taeyong unlatches his seatbelt, inches to his left, rests his head on Jaehyun's shoulder. "It's okay. I can always get us money if we need it, if you really are that worried about it." He pauses, trying to think of how to phrase it. "Is Taeil...does he want us there at a certain time?"

"I don't know. I don't know what Yuta told him, or Doyoung for that matter." Jaehyun's going 80 -- the fastest the truck will move without threatening to vibrate out from under them -- and still manages to stay undeterred when he, too, rests against Taeyong beside him. He's so tired, and doesn't look 19 at all.

Taeyong hums around his next question before asking it, tasting it against his tongue before clicking it against his teeth. "Is he in charge of things? Is this a...like, reporting to him?"

"No," Jaehyun says, before Taeyong's even really finished. "No, it isn't like that. Taeil's...he quit. He stopped right after that job that got us paid. The only reason I’m even going to see him is that he wants to be able to get rid of the gun, y’know?”

“How’s he gonna do that,” mumbles Taeyong, doubtful, but then remembers the ocean, and thinks better of his protests. “It doesn’t matter. What happens after that?”

“I quit, too,” he says simply, and Taeyong doesn’t know how to process this.

“What does that mean?” he asks after awhile.

“It means that I’m not going to be running around for anyone anymore. No, don’t make that puppy-dog face at me --” and a touch of the false twang comes out, Taeyong cringing audibly as it hits his ears, “it isn’t because of you and I won’t hear any of that. I just...I get tired of running.”

“Where’ll you go?”

“I don’t know. Probably stay in California for awhile. Or maybe I’ll get a wild hair up my ass and go raise cattle out in the middle of nowhere. It all just sort of depends on how this goes, and I’m really anxious to get it started.”

There’s this thought that Taeyong’s been purposely keeping from his mind, that once they reach the West Coast they’re done for. It’s why he’s been so needy, not that he recognises that in himself in so many words. He wants so badly to prove himself of some value, no matter what it is Jaehyun’s doing, so that he can come along -- the definition of a tagalong neighbourhood kid, but he can’t seem to stop himself from doing it. It occurs to him again now, when Jaehyun talks about what his plans might be, that none of those plans are referred to in the plural.

He shrinks away, just a fraction, the movement so subtle Jaehyun doesn’t even seem to notice.

///

New Mexico is not the sort of place that has context, because everything about it -- or, at least, what Taeyong sees through his passenger’s side window -- is so shockingly beautiful and incomparable to anything else he’s ever seen that he can’t seem to assign it its due value. Though he’s not going to meet up with his alien brethren soon -- he’d cracked that joke somewhere along the endless stretch of desert, and Jaehyun had laughed so hard he’d had to pull over to the side of the road -- it’s still one of the most breathtaking and confusing things he’s ever seen. 

There’s a gas station in the middle of this nowhere. They pass it once, then circle back to it after driving a few miles away. They park at the storefront, tucked into the lot’s uppermost corner, the truck humming tiredly beneath them. Jaehyun cuts the engine.

“What are we doing?” Taeyong asks, bemused, tucking his folded hands beneath his chin. No one had thought to warn him about the chill of the desert once the sky has fallen mainly into something deep violet, ringed with the peach and persimmon of sunset. He shivers as he speaks, even though the temperature can’t be below ninety degrees. 

“One more thing,” says Jaehyun, in this low rumble that Taeyong might find arousing were he not constantly trying to decipher the puzzle of things he’s not being told. “Do you want to drive, or do you want me to drive?” He’s turned to one side, toward Taeyong, bowed in on himself and rustling through the contents beneath the truck seat.

Everything clicks into place.

“No, we’re going to do it together, whatever it is,” and maybe it’s Taeyong’s survival instinct kicking in when it doesn’t need to, but the grim resignation in Jaehyun’s eyes, coupled with the irritation he’s been expressing all day without saying a word about it -- he _knows_ he has to pretend that he doesn’t know what this whole thing is about. “It’s a contact, right? It has to be a contact, like meeting Sicheng in Alabama…” And there’s this pleading thing about it that he hates, just for a minute, just long enough to question what the _fuck_ he’s even doing in _fucking_ New Mexico with some man he barely knows, who’s barely a man himself.

“I don’t know. I think so. I’m going to find out.” Jaehyun’s all clipped and cool, something Taeyong could never be, and he realises all at once that this life is not for him. An even keel is not something one should have when they’re about to hold up a convenience store. “Do you see any cars coming?”

Taeyong dutifully checks over his shoulder, admiring how he can still function like a human being when the shivers have turned to flat-out shakes. His heart sledgehammers against the inside of his ribcage. He’s never felt so squishy, so human as when Jaehyun finds the gun and presses it into his outstretched hand.

He thinks he sees a hint of disappointment in those eyes. “Do good. Don’t get killed.”

He looks from the gun, to Jaehyun’s face, and before he can think to stop himself he lurches forward, head at the nape of Jaehyun’s neck, a desperate kiss shared between them. “When I get back we’re going to have money and you’re going to take me to the first hotel we find,” Taeyong says, forehead pressed to Jaehyun’s, they sharing breaths that drag ragged from their lungs.

Then he slips from the car. The engine kicks on. The headlights stay dimmed, and Taeyong’s got the feeling that he’s haloed in more than just the fluorescence streaming from the storefront windows. He tucks the barrel of the gun into the waistband of his jeans. 

He steps inside, taking a series of breaths to steady himself, wishing it were Jaehyun’s air he were still sharing rather than the stale putrescence of an almost-abandoned convenience store. Taeyong makes it look like he’s interested in the drinks stocked, sweating in the cooler, then the snacks collecting dust on their shelves, then the motor oil that’s been recently restocked before approaching the counter. 

The poor guy behind the counter is bored, flipping through his cheap porno magazine with his phone face-up next to him. Taeyong doesn’t even trace a hint of recognition in his eyes. He does note that the register is ancient, a relic of the 70s and 80s gone past, button-operated instead of computer-safe. “Can I help you?” The bastard doesn’t even bother to look up, fixated on the hot girl with the fake tits draped over the hood of a sports car.

“A pack of Camel Turkish Royal,” says Taeyong, dragging the gun from his pants and pointing it directly at the cashier. “A pack of condoms and some lube if you have it.” He cocks the hammer, a play if anything, but it’s interesting, seeing the fear fill someone’s eyes. “And everything in that register that’s worth less to you than your life.” He doesn’t even recognise his own voice. Sweat prickles at his nape. He argues with himself not to rub it away.

The guy, though, backs up, so quick and frantic he knocks into the wall of smokes behind him. He falls to the cracked linoleum behind the counter. Cigarettes rain down onto his greased-up head while he pleads for whatever he considers his life, sad as it must be. "I have a girlfriend back home, please, just--"

Taeyong tries his best to pretend his hand isn't shaking. "I don't _care_," he gets out through gritted teeth, so steady he has to think he borrowed some of Jaehyun's courage in that kiss. "Give me the _fucking_ money." At least that question is answered: This is definitively _not_ a contact.

The fool throws bills into a plastic shopping bag, and when the register makes its hollow sound he offers the tiny hoard to Taeyong, ducking away from the barrel of the gun. "Please, p-please, I have a mom...don't you have a mom?"

And this is probably stupid, but it hits him just wrong.

He fires through the store's front window, a shot ringing out into the night, the bullet dragging its noise across the barren sands. "I don't," he says, grim as ever, and walks right out the door, a bell ringing over his head. He spits in the shards of glass that threaten to pierce through his shoes.

Jaehyun's got the car running, and he grins so fucking big when Taeyong thrusts the bag at him through the window. "Go, fucking go," he commands, "before that piss-pants calls someone about it."

Jaehyun laughs, and does what he's told, speeding off into the hushed dusk, quieter with each passing minute, the only disruption of the peace their trusty truck carrying them out of New Mexico entirely. "No one's coming," he explains through bouts of fierce giggles, "that store's a front. That kid doesn't know _shit_." He gasps for breath. “You shot out the _window_, oh my God, they’re gonna be so _pissed_!

And Taeyong, at a complete loss for what else to do, laughs at a hundred miles an hour.

///

An hour later they're crashing to a threadbare mattress, half-dressed and Taeyong's neck covered in mouth-made bruises that had been made along the way. He's arching into every touch offered him, shameless just as he'd been back in Texas, thighs falling open and dick so hard it nearly makes him cry with adrenaline-fueled desire. "Please, babe," he whines, high and reedy, cracking at the end of it.

"Maybe f'you hadn't kept feeling me up on the way here," Jaehyun says, mouth buried now against Taeyong's bare abdomen, the skin muffling his huffed-out laughter. "Made it hard to get us here in one piece."

"I'm trying to make us one piece," Taeyong whispers, and winches his eyes shut.

It's not a particularly nice affair, theirs -- the motel isn't that much different than it'd been outside Austin, crawling with vermin, sure to be full of germs, but Taeyong's still riding the high of his first holdup, can't think of anything but being touched more, more, _more_. Jaehyun palms him through his jeans and he presses up into the hand so intent on teasing him. Karma, he decides, is a bitch, but it’d been worth it to see Jaehyun slip out from beneath that cool exterior. He hisses through a clenched jaw and asks -- no, _demands_ that he be given more.

Jaehyun's happy to oblige, works open the fly on Taeyong's jeans, and works him free of pesky fabric. His mouth meets the target first, warm, wet lips against the crown of Taeyong's cock through the thin material of underwear that he has no business wearing. "Beautiful," he croons between slides of his tongue, expertly pressing the tip into Taeyong's slit, lapping at salty precome that’s soaked through threadbare cotton.

Taeyong gasps and cards his fingers through Jaehyun's hair, gripping him tight enough to keep him there, keep him from running away when they finally meet the ocean.

The gun, fished out of Taeyong’s waistband, its hammer having imprinted a mark into his lower back, sits at the bedside. Taeyong doesn’t look away from it when he comes in Jaehyun’s mouth.

///

The next morning they're wrapped in one another, Taeyong unable to distinguish his own body from Jaehyun's, and happy to lose himself. He must be dehydrated, because his head is spinning and he can't stop shaking for the life of him. Maybe hungry, too. He tries to remember the last time he ate. It was probably the snacks they'd bought after their shower. That was a day, a robbery, a lifetime ago.

As dawn crests over the mesas, filtering in silver through the dusty window of their motel room, Taeyong thinks of his mother, and wonders what she might think about her son, officially fucking a criminal while being one himself.

Then he drags himself from bed, and gets himself a cracked glass of water from a questionable tap.

When he comes back to bed, not ready for it to be morning just yet, Jaehyun envelops him completely. They're both still naked, and Taeyong presses the curve of his bare ass to Jaehyun's groin, hoping to stir him into waking, even if he has no intention of getting up and doing much just yet.

Jaehyun grumbles something that might be words, though neither of them are awake enough to interpret it into something intelligible. "Are you sure we're okay?" Taeyong asks him, not quite speaking to darkness when Jaehyun's awake to halfway hear.

"Yeah," Jaehyun says, cuddling in a little further, chin hooked over Taeyong's shoulder. He presses a kiss to the side of Taeyong's neck when he has the momentum in himself to do so. "Don't worry. I was told to do it."

"Told to?" Taeyong's got that same queasy feeling he did back in New Orleans, learning all Jaehyun's secrets secondhand first. “Do you do anything without being told to?”

“Yeah, you.”

“Jaehyun, I’m serious.” He rolls in the hold fitted around him, faces Jaehyun, presses their bare chests together, ignores the electricity that passes through him at the contact. "Who told you to do what?"

At first it doesn't seem like he'll get an answer, Jaehyun's mouth pressed together in a taut line that makes his features look too smooth, something haunted, reminiscent of the self Taeyong's been for much of this journey. But then something in him melts, and he leans in and kisses the swell of Taeyong's bottom lip, and he takes a deep breath. "Doyoung would like to know if you're interested in having a job, when this is all over." There's something foreboding about it, but Taeyong doesn't know, hasn't been told anything near what he needs to know to make a sound decision. He says as much, grumbling it, lips barely moving, with him muffling himself by burrowing into the side of Jaehyun's neck. Jaehyun laughs quietly, but that same apprehension doesn't go away.

"Do you want me to do it?" he asks after a long silence, marked only by the way Jaehyun traces lines into his side, raising goosebumps in his wake.

"I want you to do what you want to do."

"What can you legally tell me about it?"

"You'll probably be doing things like I did back out there, for someone else." He inhales sharply, stretches his arm over his head, rolls away with a reluctance that Taeyong tastes in the back of his throat. "Running errands. Meeting people. Gathering information. He's trying to build a base of some kind out west."

"Who would I work with?"

"Yuta, first and foremost."

"Not Taeil?" The more he hears -- or doesn't hear -- of Taeil, the more intrigued Taeyong is. "He's the one we're going to see."

"He doesn't want this anymore. I don't blame him."

"What happened?"

"He's never told any of us."

The sun has slipped in through the blinds at a different angle, when Taeyong opens his eyes. He guards his face against it, forehead to the curve of Jaehyun's clavicle, face-down and half-draped over him. When he can stand it again he lifts his head, furrows his brow up at Jaehyun. "What does that mean for us, if I do?" Though he can't say he relishes the idea of being a criminal on a professional level -- an opinion informed by Jaehyun's apparent distaste of the lifestyle -- he does like the family, odd as they are, hasn't met one of them he doesn't think he couldn't get along with. He has so few attachments, these days.

His phone, on the nightstand or in the car, somewhere abandoned along the way, hasn't pinged one time to let him know someone's thinking of him for the past week. It's lonely. He won't admit that, but it is.

"It means whatever you want it to mean," Jaehyun answers, mysterious as ever. "I can't believe you don't know this by now."

"Know what?" And here Taeyong's eyes sparkle, he knows they do, because everything in Jaehyun's young face softens, and he smiles, and he's so fucking _fond_ that a sense of belonging can't threaten it.

"I'd do anything for you," Jaehyun murmurs, reaching up and cupping his palm around the curve of Taeyong's cheek.

He's rewarded with a kiss, that turns into a dozen. They roll along the covers, entangled in one another, limbs melding and mouths meeting in the lazy, early-morning haze that haloes their temporary home. All mention of family, professional or otherwise, is forgotten as Jaehyun mouths, willful and measured, at one of Taeyong's nipples.

///

Arizona is long, quiet. They stop more often. The pressure is no longer weighing on them. They can make it to Taeil in their own time, and though Jaehyun doesn't take his foot off the gas save when they've switched positions in the seat, it seems they're idling in one spot, the desert stretching on before them forever and ever. Taeyong weighs the benefits of working with a family like Jaehyun's in the silence, tapping at his phone like it means something, like it's getting him somewhere.

_What do I have to lose?_ he asks himself.

But then he catches sight of Jaehyun's profile in the burning sunshine, and smiles despite himself, and realises this is going to be the hardest decision he's ever made.

At one point he says, "I think I want to see my dad. Just once."

Jaehyun doesn't say anything to that.

"I won't tell him anything about what we've been doing. He probably won't ask, anyway. He's never really been into questions."

Still, silence.

"Is that stupid of me? To want to see him?"

Jaehyun shrugs, rolls down the windows, and any other questions blow right out into the sun-baked sand.

///

At long last, they reach California, met with a shiny blue welcome sign letting them know about the change in time zones. Taeyong doesn't know that this is possible, but he's got a sort of travel lag hanging over him. His fault for being the one driving. Interstate 10 stretches long before them, and eventually it'll crook its way upward, drag them along the coastline. He's just a few hours from his father's home, a brief jaunt, but one he's not sure he's willing to make.

He reaches over, takes Jaehyun's hand in his, gives it a gentle squeeze. Jaehyun stirs immediately, and looks over with groggy eyes. He must not have slept well in the hotel, which is an idea that nags. Taeyong wonders what he was thinking about that kept him awake, fills the quiet space with his voice. "We're in California."

"Oh, are we?" Jaehyun unbuckles his seatbelt, ignoring the yelp of protest with which he's met, and lays down with his cheek pillowed in Taeyong's lap. The window's still open from earlier. Jaehyun sticks out his legs, seeming to stretch in a way that satisfies him. Taeyong doesn't know that he's yet seen this relaxation, but his heart skips a beat nonetheless, happy to help however he can. "Where's your dad live?"

"Santa Monica."

"You could see him, if you want. I'll be there for you if it doesn't go how you think it will."

"No, I just...I wanted to tell him I took care of Mom..." Jaehyun tips back his head, and Taeyong shushes whatever concern he might have by threading fingers into his hair, blunt nails scritching gently at his crown. "I don't know." Taeyong has worked hard these past few months to make sure he doesn't owe anyone anything, tending bar with strangers and tricking people out of petty cash to make his way across the country. He can't shake this bother that he owes his father, so that when he never speaks with him again, it'll be with a clear conscience. "Does he deserve that?"

"Does he call you on your birthday?"

"What?"

"Does he remember when your birthday is?"

"Sometimes."

"You don't owe someone who doesn't even try to remember when he made something as beautiful as you." And Jaehyun says it with this terrifying reverence, the sort that actually has Taeyong believing himself worthy of that sort of praise.

In his head, he traces the country's blood vessels, the highway system that keeps them together, and figures a roundabout. He doesn't think he wants to see Santa Monica after all.

///

In the end, it takes only another couple changes of shift, driver to passenger, before they finally reach their destination, even with the change in route. Jaehyun, averse to GPS as ever, actually uses Taeyong's phone to contact Taeil. Taeyong's not on the call, Jaehyun being fond of his privacy at the worst possible times, but can hear the voice at the other end in a quiet way, and is amused by how what must have once been a crime lord manages to sound so much like someone's dad.

That thought puts him off thinking entirely. Lucky Jaehyun is there to distract him.

At the conclusion of the phone call Jaehyun scribbles down an address on the inside of his arm, and then slowly tries to work through navigation on a phone he's never used. Taeyong coaches him through it. They laugh harder than they have to, the situation not near as funny as either of them might find it were they not both delirious with the idea of _finishing_.

"Do you want to go to the beach later?" Jaehyun asks, sliding his arm around Taeyong's shoulders, giving him a gentle squeeze.

"I'd love that," Taeyong breathes, and for the first time in a solid seven days, he's able to let go of something. His dream, as it's been established, is coming true. He wishes he had a book to pretend to read.

Jaehyun doesn’t forget the gun, when they pull up into the driveway, rifles through what remains of their belongings, the spare clothes, before finally finding the sock Taeyong had all but begged they wrap it in. 

Taeil's house is modest, but big enough that the both of them could stay. He says as much when he greets them at the door, his eyes gently accusatory -- but only toward Jaehyun, of course. "It's so nice to meet you, finally," he tells Taeyong with a smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes, "I've heard so much about you. From everyone. Doyoung asked me to have you call him. Did the two of you exchange numbers?"

"We didn't," and Taeyong's chest pangs with guilt. Should he have known better? All this wallowing about a lack of connection, and yet he's never the one making the effort.

"I'll give it to you in a bit, but the two of you look tired." There's sympathy in his eyes, and Taeyong's forced to realise that, at some point, Taeil, too, must have been new to this sort of thing. He'd never thought about the family before, how it couldn't have come from nowhere; he thinks of people like Jungwoo, and like Johnny, who just seem suited to do what they do. "Do you need anything right now?" Taeil, kindly, interrupts Taeyong's moment of distraction.

"Just a bed would be fine," Taeyong says, making it simple. "Maybe a drink, later?"

Taeil looks him up and down, and while Taeyong's not necessarily intimidated by the obvious scrutiny, he thinks of what Taeil must mean to everyone he's met along the way, every member of Jaehyun's chosen circle, and that cows him. He dips his head in deference he'd rather not demonstrate.

"Whatever you like," Taeil says at long last, and with all the authority in his narrowed-eye stare shuffles Taeyong and Jaehyun into the kitchen.

Taeyong doesn't miss the quick passage of the gun, from Jaehyun's hands to Taeil's, wriggled free of its sock and exposed for God and everyone to see.

///

They nap, entwined. Taeyong dreams of a river he can't claw his way to the banks of, and of a hand reaching out to pull him to safety. He wakes before he takes it.

Jaehyun's hand is splayed over Taeyong's chest, and Taeyong can feel every beat of his pounding heart. Maybe he will take that drink, after all. He pads, shirtless, to the kitchen, and Taeil -- posted up on his own countertop, tipping back a beer in silence, head upon a cabinet door -- must think something of it, but doesn't say anything. Taeyong swells with gratitude at the mercy. There's already a second beer sweating on the counter; Taeil offers it to him, but only after cracking it open.

"Can I ask you a question?" Taeyong leans into the corner, the place where one side of the kitchen meets another.

"Depends on whether or not I can ask you one," Taeil shoots back, and he's _sharp_. Taeyong has to take a minute.

"Yeah, alright," he says after an almost awkward pause. "I've been told that I was invited to do work for Doyoung."

"That doesn't sound like a question." Taeyong doesn't miss the grimace on Taeil's face, but doesn't linger on it too long, afraid that if he makes eye contact for long enough he'll be entered into some kind of duel to the death. He didn't sleep long enough, limbs still tired with it, the beer on his tongue only serving to make him fuzzier.

"Will it hurt Jaehyun if I want to do it?"

Taeil fiddles with the bottle, the label coming apart under his fingers. He must have been here awhile, waiting for exactly this. Taeyong, not for the first time, gets the feeling that all of this is some script he's following.

"I think he's pretty serious about you," he says at last, "if you've met everyone who was involved in the New England gig."

Curiosity wins him over. "What happened in New England?"

Taeil shrugs. "We found a rich guy. We robbed a rich guy in his own home. The rich guy is dead now, but not because of anything everyone else did."

That sparks more questions than satisfaction, but Taeyong's never one to overstay his welcome. "Guess you get to ask me two questions."

Taeil tips back his head further, laughs, whole mouth open, flashing too-perfect teeth. "Yeah, you're right," he agrees. "One, what happened to you that you would willingly take a trip with a stranger to drop off a gun and meet his entire underground crime ring?"

"A lot of things. I think it's the dead mom and the absentee dad." He doesn't know where the blitheness comes from, having had to drag it from himself just a couple weeks ago. Something about being here, in California, having a conversation with someone he barely knows, makes every word he says something liminal. Context makes everything harder, he decides. "What's the other one?"

"Two, are you going to do it?"

Taeyong, as yet, doesn't have an answer, and avoids that reality by draining his drink in one go. When he sputters on it, Taeil laughs, and gets down from his perch to beat Taeyong on the back.

///

The beach is prettier than he remembers. Granted, Taeyong hasn't seen the West Coast since his childhood, and his most recent experience is in Florida -- he'll never get over that particular brand of disdain, he decides as he kicks out of his shoes and plops down in the sand -- but maybe it's the company that has him all starry-eyed.

Jaehyun sits beside him, all-American in cuffed jeans and a white t-shirt. He, too, removes his shoes, buries his toes in the sand, leans against Taeyong with an arm wrapped around him. "Is this everything you've ever wanted?" he asks, tipping his head just so, Taeyong in his periphery.

"I think," Taeyong says slowly, careful to be loud enough over the swell of surf in the distance, "that it might be." But he looks up, lips parting, significant in the way he stares at Jaehyun.

In reply, Jaehyun swoops down and catches his lips.

The beach is fairly crowded, but no one seems to notice them, children trawling by with pails that clank with shells, chased by their aggravated parents. Though Taeyong minds the audience, it fades into background noise, as everything else does when Jaehyun kisses him. There's none of the urgency that had been there during their hookups. Jaehyun's hand rests on the side of Taeyong's neck, thumbing over the pulse that beats hard and heavy beneath his skin.

Nothing matters but this moment, he decides when they part, noses brushing.

"Stay with me," Jaehyun says, and it's so honest, so open that Taeyong's heart aches. "You can work the job, I don't care, Doyoung's my best friend and wouldn't rip you away from me--" It's a plea. Taeyong knows it's a plea. "I just...please, please stay with me."

Taeyong nods, eyes half-closed, hands at Jaehyun's cheeks. "I'll stay," he promises, calmed by the fact that the fear was mutual the whole time. He kisses Jaehyun again, briefly, a habit he's quickly forming, an addiction he needs to quell lest he die without it. "I'll stay."

Out beyond the horizon, the sun has mostly sunk beneath the sea, only its very crest still visible, bathing everything in a golden glow that makes it romantic, even for the people who haven't fallen in love right here and now. It's late. Bonfires are springing up, one by one, along the shore, pinpricks of light against the encroaching darkness. Soon, dusk will be upon them, quiet and loving, blanketing them in its care. The moon will be there, ready to take secrets, hold onto unsettled disagreements in its suspended animation, heavy with decisions yet to be made, and those made but yet to be realised. It will have nothing of Taeyong; he has made his decision.

"I'll do it," Taeyong says as a fire kicks up just a hundred feet away, its drunken worshipers cawing out in surprise. "I'll do it as long as you'll still have me."

And there, silhouetted against the growing orange of a fire that seems to rise at his command, Jaehyun cracks a smile. "I'll have you wherever, doing whatever," he says, and his hand slips into Taeyong's, both their palms crusted in California sand when their fingers knit together. 

///

The next morning, at a time when only the devil works whatever magic it is he does, Taeyong’s phone makes its first sound in a week. He doesn’t answer at first, instead googles the area code, glaring groggily into the bright backlight of his phone's screen.

New Orleans. Funny. He doesn't remember giving out his information, but then, these things find a way to happen, regardless of anyone's input. Taeyong sets an alarm and a reminder, retangles himself in Jaehyun’s limbs, finds his legs among someone else’s blankets, and goes back to sleep. 

His life of crime, he decides, can start tonight. After a drink, and some more sex, and a lot of conversation, and some more time on the beach. For now, everything is perfect.

**Author's Note:**

> please, if you liked this, come talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/appiarian) and [curious cat](http://curiouscat.me/chahakyeon)! i know i set up a lot more questions than i did answers. whatever won't probably be in a future work will probably get answered with a quickness.


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